Massive mountains, dark green to the timber line and dazzling white above it, shut in the narrow valley to right and left. A mimic torrent, ice-bound in the quieter pools, drums and gurgles on its descent midway between two railway embankments, the one to which the station and side-tracks belong, old and well-settled, the other new and as yet unballasted. Just opposite the pygmy station a lateral gorge intersects the main canyon, making a deep gash in the opposing mountain bulwark, around which the new line has to find its way by a looping detour.
In a scanty widening of the main canyon a few hundred yards below the station a graders' camp of rude slab shelters is turning out its horde of wild-looking Italians; and on a crooked spur track fronting the shanties blue wood-smoke is curling lazily upward from the kitchen car of a construction train.
All night long the Rosemary, drawn by the sturdiest of mountain-climbing locomotives, had stormed onward and upward from the valley of the Grand, through black defiles and around the shrugged shoulders of the mighty peaks to find a resting-place in the white-robed dawn on the siding at Argentine. The lightest of sleepers, Virginia had awakened when the special was passing through Carbonate; and, drawing the berth curtain, she had lain for an hour watching the solemn procession of cliffs and peaks wheeling in stately and orderly array against the inky background of sky. Now, in the steel-blue dawn, she was—or thought she was—the first member of the party to dress and steal out upon the railed platform to look abroad upon the wondrous scene in the canyon.
But her reverie, trance-like in its wordless enthusiasm, was presently broken by a voice behind her—the voice, namely, of Mr. Arthur Jastrow.
“What a howling wilderness, to be sure, isn't it?” said the secretary, twirling his eyeglasses by the cord and looking, as he felt, interminably bored.
“No, indeed; anything but that,” she retorted warmly. “It is grander than anything I ever imagined. I wish there were a piano in the car. It makes me fairly ache to set it in some form of expression, and music is the only form I know.”
“I'm glad if it doesn't bore you,” he rejoined, willing to agree with her for the sake of prolonging the interview. “But to me it is nothing more than a dreary wilderness, as I say; a barren, rock-ribbed gulch affording an indifferent right of way for two railroads.”
“For one,” she corrected, in a quick upflash of loyalty for her kin.
The secretary shifted his gaze from the mountains to the maiden and smiled. She was exceedingly good to look upon—high-bred, queenly, and just now the fine fire of enthusiasm quickened her pulses and sent the rare flush to neck and cheek.
Jastrow the cold-eyed, the business automaton, set to go off with a click at Mr. Somerville Darrah's touch, had ambitions not automatic. Some day he meant to put the world of business under foot as a conqueror, standing triumphant on the apex of that pyramid of success which the Mr. Somerville Darrahs were so painstakingly uprearing. When that day should come, there would need to be an establishment, a menage, a queen for the kingdom of success. Summing her up for the hundredth time since the beginning of the westward flight, he thought Miss Carteret would fill the requirements passing well.