After the conductor and the engineer had both consulted him, and the express messenger had appeared, armed to the teeth, a little too late for the fray, but not too late for lucid argument, Winter made his way back to the car. Miss Smith was sitting beside Archie; she was holding the watch, which had played so important a part in the battle, up under the electric light to examine an inscription. The loose black sleeves of her blouse fell back, revealing her arms; they were white and softly rounded. She looked up; and the soldier felt the sudden rush of an emotion that he had not known for years; it caught at his throat almost like an invisible hand.
“Well, Archie,” he said foolishly, “good for jiu-jitsu!”
Archie flushed up to his eyes.
“Why didn’t you obey orders, young man, and hold up your hands?” said Colonel Rupert Winter. “You’re as bad as poor Haley, who is nearly weeping that he had no chance, but only broke away from Mrs. Haley in time to see the robbers make off.”
“I—I did at first; but I got so mad I forgot,” stammered Archie happily. “Afterward you were my superior officer and I had to do what you said.”
All the while he chaffed the boy, he was watching for that beautiful look in Janet Smith’s eyes; and wondering when he could get her off by herself to brag to her of the boy’s courage. When his chance at a few words did come he chuckled: “Regular fool Winter! I knew he would act in just that absurd, reckless way.” Then he caught the look he wanted; it surely was a lovely, womanly look; and it meant—what in thunder did it mean? As he puzzled, his pulses gave the same unaccountable, smothering leap; and he felt as the boy of twenty had felt, coming back from his first battle to his first love.
CHAPTER IV
THE VANISHING OF ARCHIE
“In my opinion,” said Aunt Rebecca, critically eying her new drawing-room on the train to San Francisco; “the object of our legal methods seems to be to defend the criminal. And a very efficient means to this end is to make it so uncomfortable and costly and inconvenient for any witness of a crime that he runs away rather than endure it. Here we have had to stay over so long in Salt Lake we nearly lost our drawing-room. But never mind, you got your man committed. Did you find out anything about his gang?”
The colonel shook his head. “No, he’s a tough country boy; he has the rural distrust of lawyers and of sweat-boxes. He does absolutely nothing but groan and swear, pretending his wound hurts him. But I’ve a notion there are bigger people back of him. It’s most awfully good of you, Aunt Rebecca, to stick to me this way.”
“Of course, I stick to you; I’m too old to be fickle. Did you ever know a Winter who wouldn’t stand by his friends? I belong to the old régime, Bertie; we had our faults—glaring ones, I dare say—but if we condoned sin too readily, we never condoned meanness; such a trick as that upstart Keatcham is doing would have been impossible to my contemporaries. You saw the morning papers; you know he means to eat up the Midland?”