“I don't know. But there was an explosion: I heard it.”
“It is horribly unfair,” she went on. “I understand the sheriff is here. Couldn't he have prevented this?”
The secretary's rejoinder was a platitude: “Everything is fair in love or war.”
“But this is neither,” she retorted.
“Think not?” he said coolly. “Wait, and you'll see. And a word in your ear, Miss Carteret: you are one of us, you know, and you mustn't be disloyal. I know what you did yesterday after you read those telegrams.”
Virginia's face became suddenly wooden. Until that moment it had not occurred to her that Jastrow's motive in showing her the two telegrams might have been carefully calculated.
“I have never given you the right to speak to me that way, Mr. Jastrow,” she said, with the faintest possible emphasis on the courtesy prefix; and with that she turned from him to focus her field-glass on the construction camp below.
At the Utah stronghold all was activity of the fiercest. Winton had raced back with his news of the catastrophe, and the camp was alive with men clustering like bees and swarming upon the flat-cars of the material-train to be taken to the front.
While she looked, studiously ignoring the man behind her, Virginia saw the big octopod engine clamoring up the grade. In a twinkling the men were off and at work.
Virginia's color rose and the brown eyes filled swiftly. One part of her ideal was courage of the sort that rises the higher for reverses. But at the instant she remembered the secretary, and, lest he should spy upon her emotion, she turned and took refuge in the car.