XVIII

AT SILVER SWITCH

Like that of other railroad officials, whose duties constrain them to spend much time in transit, Lidgerwood's desk-work went with him up and down and around and about on the two divisions, and before leaving his office in the Crow's Nest to go down to the waiting special, he had thrust a bunch of letters and papers into his pocket to be ground through the business-mill on the run to Little b.u.t.te.

It was his surrept.i.tious transference of the rubber-banded bunch of letters to the oblivion of the closed service-car desk, observed by Miss Brewster, that gave the president's daughter an opportunity to make partial amends for having turned his business trip into a car-party.

Before the special was well out of the Angels yard she was commanding silence, and laying down the law for the others, particularizing Carolyn Doty, though only by way of a transfixing eye.

"Listen a moment, all of you," she called. "We mustn't forget that this isn't a planned excursion for us; it's a business trip for Mr.

Lidgerwood, and we are here by our own invitation. We must make ourselves small, accordingly, and not bother him. _Savez vous?_"

Van Lew laughed, spread his long arms, and swept them all out toward the rear platform. But Miss Eleanor escaped at the door and went back to Lidgerwood.

"There, now!" she whispered, "don't ever say that I can't do the really handsome thing when I try. Can you manage to work at all, with these chatterers on the car?"

She was steadying herself against the swing of the car, with one shapely hand on the edge of the desk, and he covered it with one of his own.

"Yes, I can work," he a.s.serted. "The one thing impossible is not to love you, Eleanor. It's hard enough when you are unkind; you mustn't make it harder by being what you used always to be to me."

"What a lover you are when you forget to be self-conscious!" she said softly; none the less she freed the imprisoned hand with a hasty little jerk. Then she went on with playful austerity: "Now you are to do exactly what you were meaning to do when you didn't know we were coming with you. I'll make them all stay away from you just as long as I can."

She kept her promise so well that for an industrious hour Lidgerwood scarcely realized that he was not alone. For the greater part of the interval the sight-seers were out on the rear platform, listening to Miss Brewster's stories of the Red Desert. When she had repeated all she had ever heard, she began to invent; and she was in the midst of one of the most blood-curdling of the inventions when Lidgerwood, having worked through his bunch of papers, opened the door and joined the platform party. Miss Brewster's animation died out and her voice trailed away into--"and that's all; I don't know the rest of it."

Lidgerwood's laugh was as hearty as Van Lew's or the collegian's.

"Please go on," he teased. Then quoting her: "'And after they had shot up all the peaceable people in the town, they fell to killing each other, and'--Don't let me spoil the dramatic conclusion."

"You are the dramatic conclusion to that story," retorted Miss Brewster, reproachfully. Whereupon she immediately wrenched the conversation aside into a new channel by asking how far it was to the canyon portal.

"Only a mile or two now," was Lidgerwood's rejoinder. "Williams has been making good time." And two minutes later the one-car train, with the foaming torrent of the Timanyoni for its pathfinder, plunged between the narrow walls of the upper canyon, and the race down the grade of the crooked water-trail through the heart of the mountains began.

There was little chance for speech, even if the overawing grandeurs of the stupendous crevice, seen in their most impressive presentment as alternating vistas of stark, moonlighted crags and gulches and depths of blackest shadow, had encouraged it. The hiss and whistle of the air-brakes, the harsh, sustained note of the shrieking wheel-f.l.a.n.g.es shearing the inner edges of the railheads on the curves, and the stuttering roar of the 266's safety-valve were continuous; a deafening medley of sounds multiplied a hundred-fold by the demoniac laughter of the echoes.

Miss Carolyn clung to the platform hand-rail, and once Lidgerwood thought he surprised Van Lew with his arm about her; thought it, and immediately concluded that he was mistaken. Miriam Holcombe had the opposite corner of the platform, and Jefferis was making it his business to see to it that she was not entirely crushed by the grandeurs.

Miss Brewster, steadying herself by the k.n.o.b of the closed door, was not overawed; she had seen Rocky Mountain canyons at their best and their worst, many times before. But excitement, and the relaxing of the conventional leash that accompanies it, roused the spirit of daring mockery which was never wholly beyond call in Miss Brewster's mental processes. With her lips to Lidgerwood's ear she said: "Tell me, Howard; how soon should a chaperon begin to make a diversion? I'm only an apprentice, you know. Does it occur to you that these young persons need to be shocked into a better appreciation of the conventions?"

There was a small Pintsch globe in the hollow of the "umbrella roof,"

with its single burner turned down to a mere pea of light. Lidgerwood's answer was to reach up and flood the platform with a sudden glow of artificial radiance. The chorus of protest was immediate and reproachful.

"Oh, Mr. Lidgerwood! don't spoil the perfect moonlight that way!" cried Miss Doty, and the others echoed the beseeching.

"You'll get used to it in a minute," a.s.serted Lidgerwood, in good-natured sarcasm. "It is so dark here in the canyon that I'm afraid some of you might fall overboard or get hit by the rocks, or something."

"The idea!" scoffed Miss Carolyn. Then, petulantly, to Van Lew: "We may as well go in. There is nothing more to be seen out here."

Lidgerwood looked to Eleanor for his cue, or at least for a whiff of moral support. But she turned traitor.

"You can do the meanest things in the name of solicitude, Howard," she began; but before she could finish he had reached up and turned the gas off with a snap, saying, "All right; anything to please the children."

After which, however, he spoke authoritatively to Van Lew and Jefferis.

"Don't let your responsibilities lean out over the railing, you two.

There are places below here where the rocks barely give a train room to pa.s.s."

"_I'm_ not leaning out," said Miss Brewster, as if she resented his care-taking. Then, for his ear alone: "But I shall if I want to."

"Not while I am here to prevent you."

"But you couldn't prevent me, you know."

"Yes, I could."

"How?"

The special was rushing through the darkest of the high-walled clefts in the lower part of the canyon. "This way," he said, his love suddenly breaking bounds, and he took her in his arms.

She freed herself quickly, breathless and indignantly reproachful.

"I am ashamed for you!" she panted. And then, with carefully calculated malice: "What if Herbert had been looking?"

"I shouldn't care if all the world had been looking," was the stubborn rejoinder. Then, pa.s.sionately: "Tell me one thing before we go any farther, Eleanor: have you given him the right to call me out?"

"How can you doubt it?" she said; but now she was laughing at him again.

There was safety only in flight, and he fled; back to his desk and the work thereon. He was wading dismally through a thick ma.s.s of correspondence, relating to a cattleman's claim for stock killed, and thinking of nothing so little as the type-written words, when the roar of the echoing canyon walls died away, and the train came to a stand at Timanyoni, the first telegraph station in the shut-in valley between the mountain ranges. A minute or two later the wheels began to revolve again, and Bradford came in.

"More maverick railroading," he said disgustedly. "Timanyoni had his red light out, and when I asked for orders he said he hadn't any--thought maybe we'd want to ask for 'em ourselves, being as we was running wild."

"So he thoughtfully stopped us to give us the chance!" snapped Lidgerwood in wrathful scorn. "What did you do?"

"Oh, as long as he had done it, I had him call up the Angels despatcher to find out where we were at. We're on 204's time, you know--ought to have met her here."

"Why didn't we?" asked the superintendent, taking the time-card from its pigeon-hole and glancing at Train 204's schedule.

"She was late out of Red b.u.t.te; broke something and had to stop and tie it up; lost a half-hour makin' her get-away."

"Then we reach Little b.u.t.te before 204 gets there--is that it?"

"That's about the way the night despatcher has it ciphered out. He gave the Timanyoni plug operator hot stuff for holdin' us up."

Lidgerwood shook his head. The artless simplicity of Red-b.u.t.te-Western methods, or unmethods, was dying hard, inexcusably hard.

"Does the night despatcher happen to know just where 204 is, at this present moment?" he inquired with gentle irony.

Bradford laughed.