Thus met Rickard and the tenor, who captured the camp that night with his singing. After dinner, MacLean carried off his prize to the Delta, where Godfrey earned his welcome. In a dark corner, Brandon was feeling the edge of his disappointment. George Verne was blocking out a new book, so she had wired. She was too busy to come. Gerty Hardin forgot to flirt with the engineers; she had discovered a new sensation. The wonderful voice twisted her heart-strings; it told her that the heart that has truly loved never forgets, and she knew that she could never have really loved, yet, because the youth in her veins was whispering to her that she could still forget. Godfrey saw a mobile plaintive face turned up to the gibbous moon; he swept it with thrills and flushes. She was a wonderful audience; she was also his orchestra, the woman with the plaintive eyes. He played on her expressions as though she were a harp.
Later, he was presented to Mrs. Hardin. She told him that the camp would no longer be dull; that she had tea every afternoon in her ramada. She convicted him archly of British-hood. “She knew he must have his tea!”
“You American women are the wonders of the world! Nothing daunts you. In the desert, and you give afternoon teas. I’ll be there every day!”
He gave her open admiration; she looked young and wistful in her soft flowing mulls, the moonlight helping her. She fell into a delicious flurry of nerves and excitement. Later, she wandered with him from a rude gaping world into a heaven of silvered decks and gleaming waters. He told her of himself, of his loneliness; his music had dropped him to self-pity.
Gerty Hardin heard her bars drop behind her. She snatched her first glimpse of freedom.
CHAPTER XXXVI
THE DRAGON SCORES
THE Palmyra was once again on its siding. Marshall was at the Front again; having made another of his swift dashes from Tucson. This time he expected officially to close the gate. Claudia was with him. She never left the car, unless it were to step out to the platform to see what she could from there of the river work, immediately returning to her wool work in the shaded compartment.
Hardin and Rickard had been devoting anxious weeks. A heavy rainfall and cloudburst in the mountains of northern Arizona had swollen the feeders of the Gila River which roared down to the Colorado above Yuma. The eroding streams carried mountains in solution which settled against the gate, a scour starting above and below it. Relief had to be given on the jump. A spur-track was rushed across the by-pass above the gate, as the closing of the ill-fated gate with the flash-boards was no longer possible. A rock-fill was the only means of closure. In the distant quarries men were digging out rock to fill the call from the river.
Marshall came down to see the completed spur. Before he reached the intake, the first rock train had moved on to the spur-track. The trestle had settled, the train thrown from the rails and wrecked.
“That’s not the way I planned to dump that rock!” was Rickard’s comment. “Now, we’ll have to stop and straighten out that trestle.”