that she could see
herself in her wonderful night-gown. She let her shining hair fall like
molten gold around her shoulders, and she wondered whether she could
ever look like the dainty creature that just now was the model she so
passionately wanted to be like. Then she blew out the lamp and sat a
while by the window, looking down through the rhododendrons, at the
shining water and at the old water-wheel sleepily at rest in the
moonlight. She knelt down then at her bedside to say her prayers--as
her dead sister had taught her to do--and she asked God to bless
Jack--wondering as she prayed that she had heard nobody else call him
Jack--and then she lay down with her breast heaving. She had told him
she would never do that again, but she couldn't help it now--the tears
came and from happiness she cried herself softly to sleep.

XIII

Hale rode that night under a brilliant moon to the worm of a railroad
that had been creeping for many years toward the Gap. The head of it was
just protruding from the Natural Tunnel twenty miles away. There he
sent his horse back, slept in a shanty till morning, and then the train
crawled through a towering bench of rock. The mouth of it on the other
side opened into a mighty amphitheatre with solid rock walls shooting
vertically hundreds of feet upward. Vertically, he thought--with the
back of his head between his shoulders as he looked up--they were more
than vertical--they were actually concave. The Almighty had not only
stored riches immeasurable in the hills behind him--He had driven this
passage Himself to help puny man to reach them, and yet the wretched
road was going toward them like a snail. On the fifth night, thereafter
he was back there at the tunnel again from New York--with a grim mouth
and a happy eye. He had brought success with him this time and there was
no sleep for him that night. He had been delayed by a wreck, it was two
o'clock in the morning, and not a horse was available; so he started
those twenty miles afoot, and day was breaking when he looked down on
the little valley shrouded in mist and just wakening from sleep.

Things had been moving while he was away, as he quickly learned.
The English were buying lands right and left at the gap sixty miles
southwest. Two companies had purchased most of the town-site where he
was--HIS town-site--and were going to pool their holdings and form an
improvement company. But a good deal was left, and straightway Hale go