“That you, Mr. Winton? Want to send something?” he asked.
“No, go to sleep. I'll write a wire and leave it for you to send in the morning.”
He sat down at the packing-case instrument table and wrote out a brief report of the day's progress in track-laying for the general manager's record. But when Carter's regular breathing told him he was alone he pushed the pad aside, took down the sending-hook, and searched until he had found the original copy of the message which had reached him at the moment of cataclysms in the lobby of the Buckingham.
“Um,” he said, and his heart grew warm within him. “It's just about as I expected: Morty didn't have anything whatever to do with it—except to sign and send it as she commanded him to.” And the penciled sheet was folded carefully and filed in permanence in the inner breast pocket of his brown duck shooting-coat.
The moon was rising behind the eastern mountain when he extinguished the candle and went out. Below lay the chaotic construction camp buried in silence and in darkness save for the lighted windows of the dinkey. He was not quite ready to go back to Adams, and after making a round of the camp and bidding the engine watchman keep a sharp lookout against a possible night surprise, he set out to walk over the newly-laid track of the day.
Another half-hour had elapsed, and a waning moon was clearing the topmost crags of Pacific Peak when he came out on the high embankment opposite the Rosemary, having traversed the entire length of the lateral loop and inspected the trestle at the gulch head by the light of a blazing spruce-branch.
The station with its two one-car trains, and the shacks of the little mining-camp beyond, lay shimmering ghost-like in the new-born light of the moon. The engine of the sheriff's car was humming softly with a note like the distant swarming of bees, and from the dancehall in Argentine the snort of a trombone and the tinkling clang of a cracked piano floated out upon the frosty night air.
Winton turned to go back. The windows of the Rosemary were all dark, and there was nothing to stay for. So he thought, at all events; but if he had not been musing abstractedly upon things widely separated from his present surroundings, he might have remarked two tiny stars of lantern-light high on the placer ground above the embankment; or, failing the sight, he might have heard the dull, measured slumph of a churn-drill burrowing deep in the frozen earth of the slope.
As it was, a pair of brown eyes blinded him, and the tones of a voice sweeter than the songs of Oberon's sea-maid filled his ears. Wherefore he neither saw nor heard; and taking the short cut across the mouth of the lateral gulch back to camp, he boarded the dinkey and went to bed without disturbing Adams.
The morning of the day to come broke clear and still, with the stars paling one by one at the pointing finger of the dawn, and the frost-rime lying thick and white like a snowfall of erect and glittering needles on iron and steel and wood.