"That's all, Dick," Ford called. "Keep an eye open for Garcia. He might make a fluke and shoot straight, for once in a way."
They stood in silence on the wind-swept summit until the curving down-rush of the western grade had swallowed the retreating engine. Miss Alicia was the first to speak when the iron clamor was distance-drowned.
"I like your Mr. Frisbie," she said reflectively. "Isn't he the kind of man who would have taken the message to the other Garcia?"
"He is the kind of man who would stop a bullet for his friend, and think nothing of it—if the bullet should happen to leave him anything to think with," he returned warmly. And then he added, half absently: "He saved my life four years ago last summer."
There was genuine human interest in her voice when she said gently:
"Would you mind telling me about it?"
"It was up in the Minnesota pineries, where we were building a branch railroad through the corner of an Indian reservation. A half-breed pot-hunter for the game companies had a right-of-way quarrel with the railroad people, and he pitched upon me as the proper person to kill. It was a knife rush in the moonlight; and Dick might have shot him, only he was too tender-hearted. So he got between us."
"Well?" she prompted, when it became evident that Ford thought he had finished.
"That was all; except that it was touch and go with poor Dick for the next six weeks, with no surgeon worthy of the name nearer than St. Paul."
Miss Alicia was more deeply impressed by the little story than she cared to have her companion suspect. Her world was a world of the commonplace conventions, with New York as its starting point and homing place; and she thought she knew something of humankind. But it came to her suddenly that the men she knew best were not at all like these two.