The shifting-engine had cut a car from the rear of the lately-arrived Alton, and was sending it down the outbound track to a coupling with the Transcontinental Limited. Adams stepped back and let it miss him by a hand's-breadth, and as the car was passing, Winton read the name on the paneling.
“The Rosemary: somebody's twenty-ton private outfit. That cooks our last chance of making up any lost time between this and tomorrow—”
He broke off abruptly. On the square rear observation platform of the private car were three ladies. One of them was small and blue-eyed, with wavy little puffs of snowy hair peeping out under her dainty widow's cap. Another was small and blue-eyed, with wavy masses of flaxen hair caught up from a face which might have served as a model for the most exquisite bisque figure that ever came out of France. But Winton saw only the third.
She was taller than either of her companions—tall and straight and lithe; a charming embodiment of health and strength and beauty: clear-skinned, brown-eyed—a very goddess fresh from the bath, in Winton's instant summing up of her, and her crown of red-gold hair helped out the simile.
Now, thus far in his thirty-year pilgrimage John Winton, man and boy, had lived the intense life of a working hermit, so far as the social gods and goddesses were concerned. Yet he had a pang—of disappointment or pointless jealousy, or something akin to both—when Adams lifted his hat to this particular goddess, was rewarded by a little cry of recognition, and stepped up to the platform to be presented to the elder and younger Bisques.
So, as we say, Winton turned and walked away as one left out, feeling one moment as though he had been defrauded of a natural right, and deriding himself the next, as a sensible man should. After a bit he was able to laugh at the “sudden attack,” as he phrased it, but later, when he and Adams were settled for the day-long run in the Denver sleeper, and the Limited was clanking out over the switches, he brought the talk around with a carefully assumed air of lack-interest to the party in the private car.
“She is a friend of yours, then?” he said, when Adams had taken the baited hook open-eyed.
The Technologian modified the assumption.
“Not quite in your sense of the word, I fancy. I met her a number of times at the houses of mutual friends in Boston. She was studying at the Conservatory.”
“But she isn't a Bostonian,” said Winton confidently.