Part 15 (1/2)

”Ah--an accomplice? Oh, no, my deah Virginia, not quite that. The word smacks too much of the po-lice cou'ts. Let us say that Misteh Winton has found your company mo' attractive than that of his laborehs, and commend his good taste in the matteh.”

So much he said by way of damping down the fire he had so rashly lighted. Then Jastrow came in with one of the interminable cipher telegrams and Virginia was left alone.

For a time she sat at the deserted breakfast-table, dry-eyed, hot-hearted, thinking such thoughts as would come crowding thickly upon the heels of such a revelation. Winton would fail: a man with honor, good repute, his entire career at stake, as he himself had admitted, would go down to miserable oblivion and defeat, lacking some friendly hand to smite him alive to a sense of his danger. And, in her uncle's estimation, at least, she, Virginia Carteret, would figure as the Delilah triumphant.

She rose, tingling to her finger-tips with the shame of it, went to her state-room, and found her writing materials. In such a crisis her methods could be as direct as a man's. Winton was coming again that evening. He must be stopped and sent about his business.

So she wrote him a note, telling him he must not come--a note man-like in its conciseness, and yet most womanly in its failure to give even the remotest hint of the new and binding reason why he must not come.

And just before luncheon an obliging Cousin Billy was prevailed upon to undertake its delivery.

When he had found Winton at the shale-slide, and had given him Miss Carteret's mandate, the Reverend Billy did not return directly to the Rosemary. On the contrary, he extended his tramp westward, stumbling on aimlessly up the canyon over the unsurfaced embankment of the new line.

Truth to tell, Virginia's messenger was not unwilling to spend a little time alone with the immensities. To put it baldly, he was beginning to be desperately cloyed with the sweets of a day-long Miss Bessie, ennuye on the one hand and despondent on the other.

Why could not the Cousin Bessies see, without being told in so many words, that the heart of a man may have been given in times long past to another woman?--to a Cousin Virginia, let us say. And why must the Cousin Virginias, pa.s.sing by the lifelong devotion of a kinsman lover, throw themselves--if one must put it thus brutally--fairly at the head of an acquaintance of a day?

So questioning the immensities, the Reverend Billy came out after some little time in a small upland valley where the two lines, old and new, ran parallel at the same level, with low embankments less than a hundred yards apart.

Midway of the valley the hundred-yard inters.p.a.ce was bridged by a hastily-constructed spur track starting from a switch on the Colorado and Grand River main line, and crossing the Utah right of way at a broad angle. On this spur, at its point of intersection with the new line, stood a heavy locomotive, steam up, and manned in every inch of its standing-room by armed guards.

The situation explained itself, even to a Reverend Billy. The Rajah had not been idle during the interval of dinner-givings and social divagations. He had acquired the right of way across the Utah's line for his blockading spur; had taken advantage of Winton's inalertness to construct the track; and was now prepared to hold the crossing with a live engine and such a show of force as might be needful.

Calvert turned back from the entrance of the valley, and was minded, in a spirit of fairness, to pa.s.s the word concerning the new obstruction on to the man who was most vitally concerned. But alas!

even a Reverend Billy may not always arise superior to his hamperings as a man and a lover. Here was defeat possible--nay, say rather defeat probable--for a rival, with the probability increasing with each hour of delay. Calvert fought it out by length and by breadth a dozen times before he came in sight of the track force toiling at the shale-slide.

Should he tell Winton, and so, indirectly, help to frustrate Mr.

Darrah's well-laid plan? Or should he hold his peace and thus, indirectly again, help to defeat the Utah company?

He put it that way in decent self-respect. Also he a.s.sured himself that the personal equation as between two lovers of one and the same woman was entirely eliminated. But who can tell which motive it was that prompted him to turn aside before he came to the army of toilers at the slide: to turn and cross the stream and make as wide a detour as the nature of the ground would permit, pa.s.sing well beyond call from the other side of the canyon?

The detour took him past the slide in silent safety, but it did not take him immediately back to the Rosemary. Instead of keeping on down the canyon on the C. G. R. side, he turned up the gulch at the back of Argentine and spent the better half of the afternoon tramping beneath the solemn spruces on the mountain. What the hours of solitude brought him in the way of decision let him declare as he sets his face finally toward the station and the private car.

”I can't do it: I can't turn traitor to the kinsman whose bread I eat.

And that is what it would come to in plain English. Beyond that I have no right to go: it is not for me to pa.s.s upon the justice of this petty war between rival corporations.”

Ah, William Calvert! is there no word then of that other and far subtler temptation? When you have reached your goal, if reach it you may, will there be no remorseful looking back to this mile-stone where a word from you might have taken the fly from your pot of precious ointment?

The short winter day was darkening to its close when he returned to the Rosemary. By dint of judicious manoeuvering, with a too-fond Bessie for an unconscious confederate, he managed to keep Virginia from questioning him; this up to a certain moment of climaxes in the evening.

But Virginia read momentous things in his face and eyes, and when the time was fully ripe she cornered him. It was the old story over again, of a woman's determination to know pitted against a truthful man's blundering efforts to conceal; and before he knew what he was about Calvert had betrayed the Rajah's secret--which was also the secret of the cipher telegrams.

Miss Carteret said little--said nothing, indeed, that an anxious kinsman lover could lay hold of. But when the secret was hers she donned coat and headgear and went out on the square-railed platform, whither the Reverend Billy dared not follow her.

But another member of the Rosemary group had more courage---or fewer scruples. When Miss Carteret let herself out of the rear door, Jastrow disappeared in the opposite direction, pa.s.sing through the forward vestibule and dropping cat-like from the step to inch his way silently over the treacherous snow-crust to a convenient spying place at the other end of the car.

Unfortunately for the spying purpose, the shades were drawn behind the two great windows and the gla.s.s door, but the starlight sufficed to show the watcher a shadowy Miss Virginia standing motionless on the side which gave her an outlook down the canyon, leaning out, it might be, to antic.i.p.ate the upcoming of some one from the construction camp below.