“'Scuse me, sah; private cyah, sah.”

It was the porter's challenge in the vestibule of the Rosemary. Adams found a card.

“Take that to Miss Carteret—Miss Virginia Carteret,” he directed, and waited till the man came back with his welcome.

The extension table in the open rear third of the private car was closed to its smallest dimensions, and the movable furnishings were disposed about the compartment to make it a comfortable lounging room.

Mrs. Carteret was propped among the cushions of a divan with a book. Her daughter occupied the undivided half of a tete-a-tete chair with a blond athlete in a clerical coat and a reversed collar. Miss Virginia was sitting alone at a window, but she rose and came to greet the visitor.

“How good of you to take pity on us!” she said, giving him her hand. Then she put him at one with the others: “Aunt Martha you have met; also Cousin Bessie. Let me present you to Mr. Calvert: Cousin Billy, this is Mr. Adams, who is responsible in a way for many of my Boston-learned gaucheries.”

Aunt Martha closed the book on her finger. “My dear Virginia!” she protested in mild deprecation; and Adams laughed and shook hands with the Reverend William Calvert and made Virginia's peace all in the same breath.

“Don't apologize for Miss Virginia, Mrs. Carteret. We were very good friends in Boston, chiefly, I think, because I never objected when she wanted to—er—to take a rise out of me.” Then to Virginia: “I hope I don't intrude?”

“Not in the least. Didn't I just say you were good to come? Uncle Somerville tells us we are passing through the famous Golden Belt,—whatever that may be,—and recommends an easy-chair and a window. But I haven't seen anything but stubble-fields—dismally wet stubble-fields at that. Won't you sit down and help me watch them go by?”

Adams placed a chair for her and found one for himself.

“'Uncle Somerville'—am I to have the pleasure of meeting Mr. Somerville Darrah?”

Miss Virginia's laugh was non-committal.

“Quien sabe?” she queried, airing her one Westernism before she was fairly in the longitude of it. “Uncle Somerville is a law unto himself. He had a lot of telegrams and things at Kansas City, and he is locked in his den with Mr. Jastrow, dictating answers by the dozen, I suppose.”

“Oh, these industry colonels!” said Adams. “Don't their toilings make you ache in sheer sympathy sometimes?”

“No, indeed,” was the prompt rejoinder; “I envy them. It must be fine to have large things to do, and to be able to do them.”

“Degenerate scion of a noble race!” jested Adams. “What ancient Carteret of them all would have compromised with the necessities by becoming a captain of industry?”

“It wasn't their metier, or the metier of their times,” said Miss Virginia with conviction. “They were sword-soldiers merely because that was the only way a strong man could conquer in those days. Now it is different, and a strong man fights quite as nobly in another field—and deserves quite as much honor.”

“Think so? I don't agree with you—as to the fighting, I mean. I like to take things easy. A good club, a choice of decent theaters, the society of a few charming young women like—”

She broke him with a mocking laugh.

“You were born a good many centuries too late, Mr. Adams; you would have fitted so beautifully, into decadent Rome.”

“No—thanks. Twentieth-century America, with the commercial frenzy taken out of it, is good enough for me. I was telling Winton a little while ago—”

“Your friend of the Kansas City station platform?” she interrupted. “Mightn't you introduce us a little less informally?”

“Beg pardon, I'm sure—yours and Jack's: Mr. John Winton, of New York and the world at large, familiarly known to his intimates—and they are precious few—as 'Jack W.' As I was about to say—”

But she seemed to find a malicious satisfaction in breaking in upon him.

“'Mr. John Winton': it's a pretty name as names go, but it isn't as strong as he is. He is an 'industry colonel,' isn't he? He looks it.”

The Bostonian avenged himself at Winton's expense for the unwelcome interruption.

“So much for your woman's intuition,” he laughed. “Speaking of idlers, there is your man to the dotting of the 'i'; a dilettante raised to the nth power.”

Miss Carteret's short upper lip curled in undisguised scorn.

“I like men who do things,” she asserted with pointed emphasis; whereupon the talk drifted eastward to Boston, and Winton was ignored until Virginia, having exhausted the reminiscent vein, said, “You are going on through to Denver?”

“To Denver and beyond,” was the reply. “Winton has a notion of hibernating in the mountains—fancy it; in the dead of winter!—and he has persuaded me to go along. He sketches a little, you know.”

“Oh, so he is an artist?” said Virginia, with interest newly aroused.

“No,” said Adams gloomily, “he isn't an artist—isn't much of anything, I'm sorry to say. Worse than all, he doesn't know his grandfather's middle name. Told me so himself.”

“That is inexcusable—in a dilettante,” said Miss Virginia mockingly. “Don't you think so?”

“It is inexcusable in anyone,” said the Technologian, rising to take his leave. Then, as a parting word: “Does the Rosemary set its own table? or do you dine in the dining-car?”

“In the dining-car, if we have one. Uncle Somerville lets us dodge the Rosemary's cook whenever we can,” was the answer; and with this bit of information Adams went his way to the Denver sleeper.

Finding Winton in his section, poring over a blue-print map and making notes thereon after the manner of a man hard at work, Adams turned back to the smoking-compartment.

Now for Mr. Morton P. Adams the salt of life was a joke, harmless or otherwise, as the tree might fall. So, during the long afternoon which he wore out in solitude, there grew up in him a keen desire to see what would befall if these two whom he had so grotesquely misrepresented each to the other should come together in the pathway of acquaintanceship.

But how to bring them together was a problem which refused to be solved until chance pointed the way. Since the Limited had lost another hour during the day there was a rush for the dining-car as soon as the announcement of its taking-on had gone through the train. Adams and Winton were of this rush, and so were the members of Mr. Somerville Darrah's party. In the seating the party was separated, as room at the crowded tables could be found; and Miss Virginia's fate gave her the unoccupied seat at one of the duet tables, opposite a young man with steadfast gray eyes and a firm jaw.

Winton was equal to the emergency, or thought he was. Adams was still within call and he beckoned him, meaning to propose an exchange of seats. But the Bostonian misunderstood wilfully.

“Most happy, I'm sure,” he said, coming instantly to the rescue. “Miss Carteret, my friend signals his dilemma. May I present him?”

Virginia smiled and gave the required permission in a word. But for Winton self-possession fled shrieking.

“Ah—er—I hope you know Mr. Adams well enough to make allowances for his—for his—” He broke down helplessly and she had to come to his assistance.

“For his imagination?” she suggested. “I do, indeed; we are quite old friends.”

Here was “well enough,” but Winton was a man and could not let it alone.

“I should be very sorry to have you think for a moment that I would—er—so far forget myself,” he went on fatuously. “What I had in mind was an exchange of seats with him. I thought it would be pleasanter for you; that is, I mean, pleasanter for—” He stopped short, seeing nothing but a more hopeless involvement ahead; also because he saw signals of distress or of mirth flying in the brown eyes.

“Oh, please!” she protested in mock humility. “Do leave my vanity just the tiniest little cranny to creep out of, Mr. Winton. I'll promise to be good and not bore you too desperately.”

At this, as you would imagine, the pit of utter self-abasement yawned for Winton, and he plunged headlong, holding the bill of fare wrong side up when the waiter asked for his dinner order, and otherwise demeaning himself like a man taken at a hopeless disadvantage. She took pity on him.

“But let's ignore Mr. Adams,” she went on sweetly. “I am much more interested in this,” touching the bill of fare. “Will you order for me, please? I like—”

When she had finished the list of her likings, Winton was able to smile at his lapse into the primitive, and gave the dinner order for two with a fair degree of coherence. After that they got on better. Winton knew Boston, and, next to the weather, Boston was the safest and most fruitful of the commonplaces. Nevertheless, it was not immortal; and Winton was just beginning to cast about for some other safe riding road for the shallop of small talk when Miss Carteret sent it adrift with malice aforethought.

It was somewhere between the entrees and the fruit, and the point of departure was Boston art.

“Speaking of art, Mr. Winton, will you tell me how you came to think of sketching in the mountains of Colorado at this time of year? I should think the cold would be positively prohibitive of anything like that.”

Winton stared—open-mouthed, it is to be feared.

“I—I beg your pardon,” he stammered, with the inflection which takes its pitch from blank bewilderment.

Miss Virginia was happy. Dilettante he might be, and an unhumbled man of the world as well; but, to use the Reverend Billy's phrase, she could make him “sit up.”

“I beg yours, I'm sure,” she said demurely. “I didn't know it was a craft secret.”

Winton looked across the aisle to the table where the Technologian was sitting opposite a square-shouldered, ruddy-faced gentleman with fiery eyes and fierce white mustaches, and shook a figurative fist.

“I'd like to know what Adams has been telling you,” he said. “Sketching in the mountains in midwinter! that would be decidedly original, to say the least of it. And I think I have never done an original thing in all my life.”

For a single instant the brown eyes looked their pity for him; generic pity it was, of the kind that mounting souls bestow upon the stagnant. But the subconscious lover in Winton made it personal to him, and it was the lover who spoke when he went on.

“That is a damaging admission, is it not? I am sorry to have to make it—to have to confirm your poor opinion of me.”

“Did I say anything like that?” she protested.

“Not in words; but your eyes said it, and I know you have been thinking it all along. Don't ask me how I know it: I couldn't explain it if I should try. But you have been pitying me, in a way—you know you have.”

The brown eyes were downcast. Frank and free-hearted after her kind as she was, Virginia Carteret was finding it a new and singular experience to have a man tell her baldly at their first meeting that he had read her inmost thought of him. Yet she would not flinch or go back.

“There is so much to be done in the world, and so few to do the work,” she pleaded in extenuation.

“And Adams has told you that I am not one of the few? It is true enough to hurt.”

She looked him fairly in the eyes. “What is lacking, Mr. Winton—the spur?”

“Possibly,” he rejoined. “There is no one near enough to care, or to say 'Well done!'”

“How can you tell?” she questioned musingly. “It is not always permitted to us to hear the plaudits or the hisses—happily, I think. Yet there are always those standing by who are ready to cry 'Io triumphe!' and mean it, when one approves himself a good soldier.”

The coffee had been served, and Winton sat thoughtfully stirring the lump of sugar in his cup. Miss Carteret was not having a monopoly of the new experiences. For instance, it had never before happened to John Winton to have a woman, young, charming, and altogether lovable, read him a lesson out of the book of the overcomers.

He smiled inwardly and wondered what she would say if she could know to what battlefield the drumming wheels of the Limited were speeding him. Would she be loyal to her mentorship and tell him he must win, at whatever the cost to Mr. Somerville Darrah and his business associates? Or would she, womanlike, be her uncle's partizan and write one John Winton down in her blackest book for daring to oppose the Rajah?

He assured himself it would make no jot of difference if he knew. He had a thing to do, and he was purposed to do it strenuously, inflexibly. Yet in the inmost chamber of his heart, where the barbarian ego stands unabashed and isolate and recklessly contemptuous of the moralities minor and major, he saw the birth of an influence which inevitably must henceforth be desperately reckoned with.

Given a name, this new-born life-factor was love; love barely awakened, and as yet no more than a masterful desire to stand well in the eyes of one woman. None the less, he saw the possibilities: that a time might come when this woman would have the power to intervene; would make him hold his hand in the business affair at the very moment, mayhap, when he should strike the hardest.

It was a rather unnerving thought, and when he considered it he was glad that their ways, coinciding for the moment, would presently go apart, leaving him free to do battle as an honest soldier in any cause must.

The Rosemary party was rising, and Winton rose, too, folding the seat for Miss Virginia and carefully reaching her wrap from the rack.

“I am so glad to have met you,” she said, giving him the tips of her fingers and going back to the conventionalities as if they had never been ignored.

But the sincerity in Winton's reply transcended the conventional form of it.

“Indeed, the pleasure has been wholly mine, I assure you. I hope the future will be kind to me and let me see more of you.”

“Who knows?” she rejoined, smiling at him level-eyed. “The world has been steadily growing smaller since Shakespeare called it 'narrow.'”

He caught quickly at the straw of hope. “Then we need not say good-by?”

“No; let it be auf Wiedersehen,” she said; and he stood aside to allow her to join her party.

Two hours later, when Adams was reading in his section and Winton was smoking his short pipe in the men's compartment and thinking things unspeakable with Virginia Carteret for a nucleus, there was a series of sharp whistle-shrieks, a sudden grinding of the brakes, and a jarring stop of the Limited—a stop not down on the time-card.

Winton was among the first to reach the head of the long train. The halt was in a little depression of the bleak plain, and the train-men were in conference over a badly-derailed engine when Winton came up. A vast herd of cattle was lumbering away into the darkness, and a mangled carcass under the wheels of the locomotive sufficiently explained the accident.

“Well, there's only the one thing to do,” was the engineer's verdict. “That's for somebody to mog back to Arroyo to wire for the wreck-wagon.”

“Yes, by gum! and that means all night,” growled the conductor.

There was a stir in the gathering throng of half-alarmed and all-curious passengers, and a red-faced, white-mustached gentleman, whose soft southern accent was utterly at variance with his manner, hurled a question bolt-like at the conductor.

“All night, you say, seh? Then we miss ouh Denver connections?”

“You can bet to win on that,” was the curt reply.

“Damn!” said the ruddy-faced gentleman; and then in a lower tone: “I beg your pahdon, my deah Virginia; I was totally unaware of your presence.”

Winton threw off his overcoat.

“If you will take a bit of help from an outsider, I think we needn't wait for the wrecking-car,” he said to the dubious trainmen. “It's bad, but not so bad as it looks. What do you say?”

Now, as everyone knows, it is not in the nature of operative railway men to brook interference even of the helpful sort. But they are as quick as other folk to recognize the man in essence, as well as to know the clan slogan when they hear it. Winton did not wait for objections, but took over the command as one in authority.

“Think we can't do it? I'll show you. Up on the tank, one of you, and heave down the jacks and frogs. We'll have her on the steel again before you can say your prayers.”

At the hearty command, churlish reluctance vanished and everybody lent a willing hand. In two minutes the crew of the Limited knew it was working under a master. The frogs were adjusted under the derailed wheels, the jack-screws were braced to lift and push with the nicest accuracy, and all was ready for the attempt to back the engine in trial. But now the engineer shook his bead.

“I ain't the artist to move her gently enough with all that string o' dinkeys behind her,” he said unhopefully.

“No?” said Winton. “Come up into the cab with and I'll show you how.” And he climbed to the driver's footboard with the doubting engineer at his heels.

The reversing-lever went over with a clash; the air whistled into the brakes; and Winton began to ease the throttle open. The steam sang into the cylinders, the huge machine trembling like a living thing under the hand of a master.

Slowly and by almost imperceptible degrees the life of the pent-up boiler power crept into the pistons and out through the connecting rods to the wheels. With the first thrill of the gripping tires Winton leaned from the window to watch the derailed trucks climb by half-inches up the inclined planes of the frogs.

At the critical instant, when the entire weight of the forward half of the engine was poising for the drop upon the rails, he gave the precise added impulse. The big ten-wheeler coughed hoarsely and spat fire; the driving-wheels made a quick half-turn backward; and a cheer from the onlookers marked the little triumph of mind over matter.

Winton found Miss Carteret holding his overcoat when he swung down from the cab, and he fancied her enthusiasm was tempered with something remotely like embarrassment. But she suffered him to walk back to the private car beside her; and in this sudden retreat from the scene of action he missed hearing the comments of his fellow craftsmen.

“You bet, he's no 'prentice,” said the fireman.

“Not much!” quoth the engineer. “He's an all-round artist, that's about what he is. Shouldn't wonder if he was the travelin' engineer for some road back in God's country.”

“Travelin' nothing!” said the conductor. “More likely he's a train-master, 'r p'raps a bigger boss than that. Call in the flag, Jim, and we'll be getting a move.”

Oddly enough, the comment on Winton did not pause with the encomiums of the train crew. When the Limited was once more rushing on its way through the night, and Virginia and her cousin were safe in the privacy of their state-room, Miss Carteret added her word.

“Do you know, Bessie, I think it was Mr. Adams who scored this afternoon?” she said.

“How so?” inquired la petite Bisque, who was too sleepy to be over-curious.

“I think he 'took a rise' out of me, as he puts it. Mr. Winton is precisely all the kinds of man Mr. Adams said he wasn't.”