Winton admitted the impeachment without prejudice to his own point of view.
“Perhaps you are right. But forewarned is forearmed. And Miss Virginia is not going to lend herself to any such nefarious scheme.”
“Not consciously, perhaps; but you don't know her yet. If she saw a good chance to take the conceit out of you, she'd improve it—without thinking overmuch of the possible consequences to the Utah company.”
“Pshaw!” said Winton. “That is another of your literary inferences. I've met her only twice, yet I venture to say I know her better than you do. If she cared anything for me—which she doesn't—”
“Oh, go to sleep!” said Adams, who was not minded to argue further with a man besotted; and so the matter went by default for the time.
But in the days that followed, days in which the sun rose and set in cloudless winter splendor and the heavy snows still held aloof, Adams' prediction wrought itself out into sober fact. After the single appeal to force, Mr. Darrah seemed to give up the fight. None the less, the departure of the Rosemary was delayed, and its hospitable door was always open to the Utah chief of construction and his assistant.
It was very deftly done, and even Adams, the clear-eyed, could not help admiring the Rajah's skilful finesse. Of formal dinner-givings there might easily have been an end, since the construction camp had nothing to offer in return. But the formalities were studiously ignored, and the two young men were put upon a footing of intimacy and encouraged to come and go as they pleased.
Winton took his welcome broadly, as what lover would not? and within a week was spending most of his evenings in the Rosemary—this at a time when every waking moment of the day and night was deeply mortgaged to the chance of success. For now that the Rajah had withdrawn his opposition, Nature and the perversity of inanimate things had taken a hand, and for a fortnight the work of track-laying paused fairly within sight of the station at Argentine.
First it was a carload of steel accidentally derailed and dumped into Quartz Creek at precisely the worst possible point in the lower canyon, a jagged, rock-ribbed, cliff-bound gorge where each separate piece of metal had to be hoisted out singly by a derrick erected for the purpose—a process which effectually blocked the track for three entire days. Next it was another landslide (unhelped by dynamite, this) just above the station, a crawling cataract of loose, sliding shale which, painstakingly dug out and dammed with plank bulkhead during the day, would pour down and bury bulkhead, buttresses, and the very right of way in the night.
In his right mind—the mind of an ambitious young captain of industry who sees defeat with dishonor staring him in the face—Winton would have fought all the more desperately for these hindrances. But, unfortunately, he was no longer an industry captain with an eye single to success. He was become that anomaly despised of the working world—a man in love.