The Daughter of a Magnate

by Frank H. Spearman

Glover knew snow had been falling steadily on the main line for two days. East of the middle range it was nothing but extreme cold, west it had been one long storm. Morris Blood was at Goose River. The message was not an order; but on the division there was no one else available at the moment that could handle safely such a battery of engines as would be needed to bore the drifts west of the sheds. Moreover, Glover knew how Bucks had chafed under the conditions that kept the directors on his hands. They were impatient to get to the coast, and the general manager was anxious to be rid of them as soon as there should be some certainty of getting them safely over the mountains.

Glover, on the back of the telegram, scrawled a note to Crosby, the master-mechanic, and turned over not to sleep, but to think—and to think, not of the work before him, but of her and of her situation. A roundhouse caller roused him at half-past three with word that the snow battery was marked up for four o'clock. He rose, dressed deliberately and carefully for the exposure ahead, and sat down before a candle to tell Gertrude, in a note, when he hoped to be back.

Locking his trunk when he had done, he snuffed out the candle and closed his room door behind him. The hall was dark, but he knew its turns, and the carpeted stairs gave no sound as he walked down. At the second floor there were two stairways by which he could descend. He looked up the dim corridor toward where she slept. Somehow he could not make up his mind to leave without passing her room.

His heavy tread was noiseless, and at her door he paused and put his hand uncertainly upon the casing. In the darkness his head bent an instant on his outstretched arm—it had never before been hard to go; then he turned and walked softly away.

At the breakfast table and at the dinner table the talk was of the snow. The evening paper contained a column of despatches concerning the blockade, now serious, in the eighth district. Half the first page was given to alarming reports from the cattle ranges. Two mail-carriers were reported lost in the Sweetgrass country, and a ski runner from Fort Steadman, which had been cut off for eight days, told of thirty-five feet of snow in the Whitewater hills.

Sleepy Cat reported eighteen inches of fresh snow, and a second delayed despatch under the same date-line reported that a bucking special from Medicine Bend, composed of a rotary, a flanger, and five locomotives had passed that point at 9 A.M. for the eighth district.

Gertrude found no interest in the news or the discussion. She could only wonder why she did not see Glover during the day, and when he made no appearance at dinner she grew sick with uncertainty. Leaving the dining-room ahead of the party in some vague hope of seeing him, Solomon hurried up with the note that Glover had left to be given her in the morning. The boy had gone off duty before she left her room and had over-slept, but instead of waiting for his apologies she hastened to her room and locked her door to devour her lover's words. She saw that he had written her in the dead of night to explain his going, and to say good-by. Bucks' message he had enclosed. "But I shall work very hard every hour I am gone to get back the sooner," he promised, "and if you hear of the snow flying over the peaks on the West End you will know that I am behind it and headed straight for you."

When Marie and Mrs. Whitney came up, Gertrude sat calmly before the grate fire, but the note lay hidden over her heart, for in it he had whispered that while he was away every night at eight o'clock and every morning, no matter where she should be, or what doing, he should kiss her lips and her eyes as he had kissed them that first morning in the dark, warm office. When eight o'clock came her aunt and her sister sat with her; but Gertrude at eight o'clock, musing, was with her lover and her lips and eyes again were his to do with what he would. Later Doctor Lanning came in and she roused to hear the news about the snow. Between Sleepy Cat and Bear Dance two passenger trains were stalled, and on Blackbird hill the snow was reported four feet deep on the level.

When the doctor had gone and Marie had retired, Gertrude's aunt talked to her seriously about her father, whose almost frantic condition over what he called Gertrude's infatuation was alarming.

Her aunt explained how her final refusal of Allen Harrison, a connection on which her father had set his heart, might result in the total disruption of the plans which held so mighty interests together; and how impossible it was that he should ever consent to her throwing herself away on an obscure Western man.