Momentary as the shock had been, I found that Polly had remarked it. She spoke of it on the ride back to our retreat at Carter's.
"Are you feeling entirely well, Jimmie, dear?" she asked; and before I could reply: "You had a bad turn of some sort while we were at table. I saw it in your face and eyes."
I hastened to assure her that there was nothing the matter with me; that there couldn't be anything the matter with a man who had died and gone to heaven nearly a month previous to the dinner at El Tovar.
"But the man has got to go back to earth again pretty soon, and take the woman with him," she retorted, laughing. "Just think, Jimmie; it has been nearly a month, as you say, and we haven't had a letter or a telegram in all that time! Not that I'm regretting anything; I'm happy, dearest—as happy as an angel with wings; but I want to see my daddy."
The heavenly path was leading back into the old world again, the fighting world, and I knew it, and presently we were taking all the steps of the delightful vanishing in reverse; boarding the through train at Williams, catching glimpses of the stupendous majesty of mountain and plain as the powerful locomotives towed us up the grades of the Raton, doing a brisk walk on the platform at Albuquerque while the train paused, and all the rest of it.
From Trinidad I wired Barrett, telling him that we were on our way home; that we should go in by way of Colorado Springs instead of Florence, with a stop-over between trains for dinner at the Antlers. I half-expected he would run down to the Springs to meet us, and so he did, bringing Father Phineas with him. Polly's love for her father was always very sweet and touching, and Barrett and I left them to themselves at the meeting.
"I'm mighty glad to see you back, Jimmie, old man," Barrett declared, when we had found a quiet corner in the rotunda. "You are looking like a new man, and I guess you are one. And you are on your feet again financially, too. We declared a dividend yesterday, and you've got a bank account that will warm the cockles of your silly old heart."
"How is Gifford? and how are things at the mine?" I asked.
"Gifford is all right; only he's got too much money—doesn't know what to do with it now that he has built all the new houses the camp will stand for. And the Little Clean-Up is all right, too; though we are digging into a small mystery just now."
"A mystery?" I queried.