Lane turned in his saddle and looked at the elegant figure that his wife made on horseback.
"He isn't half as interesting as Tom Darnell or Rob," she added.
"I stand him," he explained, smiling, "for the reason men stand each other most often,—we make money together."
"Why, how do you mean? He isn't in the railroad."
"I mean in coal mines," he replied vaguely, and Isabelle realized that she was trespassing on that territory of man's business which she had been brought up to keep away from. Nevertheless, as they rode homeward in the westering golden light, she thought of several things:—John was in other business than the railroad, and that puffy-faced German-American was in some way connected with it; business covered many mysteries; a man did business with people he would not ordinarily associate with. It even crossed her mind that what with sleep and business a very large part of her husband's life lay quite beyond her touch. Perhaps that was what the Kentuckian meant by his ideal,—to live life with some loved one far away in companionship altogether intimate.
But before long she was thinking of the set of her riding-skirt, and that led to the subject of summer gowns which she meant to get when she went East with her mother, and that led on to the question of the summer itself. It had been decided that Isabelle should not spend another summer in the Torso heat, but whether she should go to the Connecticut place or accept Margaret Lawton's invitation to the mountains, she was uncertain. Thus pleasantly her thoughts drifted on into her future.
CHAPTER X
If Isabelle had been curious about her husband's interest in the Pleasant Valley Coal Company, she might have developed a highly interesting chapter of commercial history, in which Mr. Freke and John Lane were enacting typical parts.
The Atlantic and Pacific railroad corporation is, as may easily be inferred, a vast organism, with a history, a life of its own, lying like a thick ganglia of nerves and blood-vessels a third of the way across our broad continent, sucking its nourishment from thousands of miles of rich and populous territory. To write its history humanly, not statistically, would be to reveal an important chapter in the national drama for the past forty years,—a drama buried in dusty archives, in auditors' reports, vouchers, mortgage deeds, general orders, etc. Some day there will come the great master of irony, the man of insight, who will make this mass of routine paper glow with meaning visible to all!
Meanwhile this Atlantic and Pacific, which to-day is a mighty system, was once only a handful of atoms. There was the period of Birth; there was the period of Conquest; and finally there has come the period of Domination. Now, with its hold on the industry, the life of eight states, complete, like the great Serpent it can grumble, "I lie here possessing!"