Time passed before Barbara opened her lips for a long, quivering intake of breath.
"I never dreamed it could be so big," she murmured in awe. "And then to think that some day—within a few months in reality—engines will go screeching their signals across this very place. It doesn't seem possible; it seems almost a shame to spoil it, too."
Her earnestness was so unconsciously wistful that Steve could not help but smile at it a little, even though he had been telling himself, since the moment of her coming, that he must not let himself dwell just then upon that wistfulness which, for many hours, had been most apparent to him.
"I've felt that way about it often," he answered, almost dully. "I like it better myself, as it is. It does appear to be a long way ahead, doesn't it—that day of completion which you cover in the screech of the whistles? Only to-day, when we were scrambling about down there in the alders, it took nearly all the imagination I possessed to see two streaks of steel where there is nothing but thicket now. But as for the bigness of it"—he laughed deprecatingly—"it isn't so very big, you know. It's just a—a mean sort of proposition."
Barbara leaned forward, delicate chin resting upon interlocked fingers. She was not quite certain whether she had caught a thread of weariness in those words.
"To me," she said, "to me it is colossal! Why, I thought the work at Morrison seemed complicated and tangled enough, but there—there isn't even a beginning or an ending here. There's nothing but woods and water."
She pointed out across the valley toward a mound-like outline yellow under the moon; pointed into the north and asked another question.
"Is that part of the embankment?" she wanted to know. "Is that the direction in which Mr. Wickersham's timber lies?"
The man nodded.
"Just a few miles up through that notch," he told her. "That's the end of the rail-bed which we have been building along the river-edge."