But the sincerity in Winton's reply transcended the conventional form of it.
“Indeed, the pleasure has been wholly mine, I assure you. I hope the future will be kind to me and let me see more of you.”
“Who knows?” she rejoined, smiling at him level-eyed. “The world has been steadily growing smaller since Shakespeare called it 'narrow.'”
He caught quickly at the straw of hope. “Then we need not say good-by?”
“No; let it be auf Wiedersehen,” she said; and he stood aside to allow her to join her party.
Two hours later, when Adams was reading in his section and Winton was smoking his short pipe in the men's compartment and thinking things unspeakable with Virginia Carteret for a nucleus, there was a series of sharp whistle-shrieks, a sudden grinding of the brakes, and a jarring stop of the Limited—a stop not down on the time-card.
Winton was among the first to reach the head of the long train. The halt was in a little depression of the bleak plain, and the train-men were in conference over a badly-derailed engine when Winton came up. A vast herd of cattle was lumbering away into the darkness, and a mangled carcass under the wheels of the locomotive sufficiently explained the accident.
“Well, there's only the one thing to do,” was the engineer's verdict. “That's for somebody to mog back to Arroyo to wire for the wreck-wagon.”
“Yes, by gum! and that means all night,” growled the conductor.
There was a stir in the gathering throng of half-alarmed and all-curious passengers, and a red-faced, white-mustached gentleman, whose soft southern accent was utterly at variance with his manner, hurled a question bolt-like at the conductor.