“I didn't suppose they would have a telegraph office,” she commented, with hope rising again.
“Oh, yes; they'd have to have a wire—one of their own. Under the circumstances they could hardly use ours.”
“No,” she rejoined absently. She was scanning the group of steel-handlers in the hope that a young man in a billy-cock hat and with a cigarette between his lips would shortly reveal himself. She found him after a time and turned quickly to her cousin.
“There is Mr. Adams down by the engine. Do you think he would come over and speak to us if he knew we were here?”
The Reverend Billy's smile was of honest admiration.
“How could you doubt it? Wait here a minute and I'll call him for you.”
He was gone before she could reply—across the ice-bridge spanning one of the pools, and up the rough, frozen embankment of the new line. There were armed guards here, too, as well as at the front, and one of them halted him at the picket line. But Adams saw and recognized him, and presently the two were crossing to where Virginia stood waiting for them.
“Eheu! what a little world we live in, Miss Virginia! Who would have thought of meeting you here?” said Adams, taking her hand at the precise elevation prescribed by good form—Boston good form.
“The shock is mutual,” she laughed. “I must say that you and Mr. Winton have chosen a highly unconventional environment for your sketching-field.”
“I'm down,” he admitted cheerfully; “please don't trample on me. But really, it wasn't all fib. Jack does do things with a pencil—other things besides maps and working profiles, I mean. Won't you come over and let me do the honors of the studio?”—with a grandiloquent arm-sweep meant to include the construction camp in general and the “dinkey” caboose-car in particular.