CHAPTER XVIII
NEW PROSPECTS
THE Mundys’ stable boss saddled for Madge the black gelding that she had ridden when she called on Joshua, and for him a blaze-faced bay which had been Bloodmop’s saddler. Side by side they took up the trail through the woods, and soon were ascending sharply to the work above.
They watched the strings of dump-cars traveling swiftly under momentum from a fifty-foot cut which extended to the mouth of the drippy tunnel. Muck from the tunnel was being carried to its dump over another route by men “pullin’ ’im by the whiskers,” which, in construction parlance, means leading with a rope a horse or mule hitched to a cart. They looked on in silence for a time, then Madge said:
“This means a lot to me, Joshua. You know, I was a harum-scarum kid when you met me, pretty good with a team and a wheeler even at that age, and wild about railroading. Well, I never got over it. It’s my delight to-day. I love the work and the free-and-easy, democratic life in the open country. I fell into bossing the job naturally when poor Pa died, and I’ve been making good. Ma, of course, thinks it’s no job for a girl, and if we could let go I guess she’d be willing enough to get me away from it all. But she’s an old dear—she never tries to make me quit. Well, why should I? Isn’t this the day when it’s up to women to show the stuff they’re made of? And I’ll show ’em, if we can swing this job. Tell me one thing,” she broke off abruptly: “Why are you here?”
“Why,” Joshua replied, trying to put innocence into his tones, “didn’t you invite me?”
“I mean why are you out West—on this particular job?”
He looked her over carefully, the ghost of a smile on his lips. He was far from disconcerted.
“I may as well confess to the truth,” he told her. “I came hunting you.”
She drew in her breath slightly.
“Your question was a frank one, Madge—I made my reply as frank. During all those years in the House of Refuge I never forgot you. It was my boyish ambition, you know, to travel West with your father. And when they nabbed me and put me away I clung to the idea. Then when I was pardoned I had no place to go. My brother—the boy for whom I went to the House of Refuge, if you want to get down to fine points—would have nothing to do with me. My father, of course, was still impossible. So I went on the bum and hunted you up. I knew I’d find you out here somewhere.”