"There it is again," she retorted. "You are dragging me in—and trying to bribe me, too!"
"God forbid!" he said, so earnestly that she forgave him. And then: "I wish your brother were here—now."
"So do I," she admitted. Then she told him of the wire summons sent from Denver, and of the shadowy hope she had based upon it.
"Where was your brother then?" he asked.
"I don't know, positively. I hope he was in New York. He was to come over in the Campania, in time for the shooting at Mount Ptarmigan."
"You've had no word from him?"
"None."
They were up with the track-layers, now, in a country of huge bare hills and high-lying, waterless valleys; and the president had halted the caravan to give his guests a chance to see a modern railroad in the actual throes of evolution.
In a specialist in the trade, Ford's genius might have invoked enthusiasm. Speed was the end to which all of the young engineer's inventive powers had been directed; and the pace was furious. On the leveled grade ahead of the track-laying train an army of sweating laborers marched and counter-marched like trained soldiers, placing the cross-ties in position. On a train of specially constructed flat-cars another army was bolting together a long section of track, clamping the double line of rails at intervals to hold them to gauge. At the word, "Ready!" a hauling chain, passing through an anchored pulley-block far up the grade and back to the freed engine of the construction train, was made fast to the forward end of the bolted section; a second word of command, and the engine backed swiftly, dragging the prepared section off over the rollers of the flat-cars and into place on the ties. With the clanging fall of the final pair of rails, a third army, spike-drivers these, fell upon the newly placed steel, shouting their chantey as they swung the great pointed hammers; and in the midst of this fresh turmoil the train, with its brigade of bolters deftly preparing another section, was slowly pushed to the new front for another advance.
"It is like clockwork," was Miss Alicia's enthusiastic comment. "Did you invent it, Mr. Ford?"