who are
going with the party, and they will take care of you and bring you back
this evening."

"Friends of ours?" she queried; "who are they?"

"Ah, I promised not to tell you beforehand. Will you go?"

"Certainly, if you have arranged it," she rejoined, still speaking
indifferently because she was unwilling to show him how glad she was.
For she was frankly glad. The glamour of last night's revelation was
over the recollection of those other days spent with Brockway, and she
was impatiently eager to put her impressions quickly to the test of
repetition--to suffer loss, if need be, but by all means to make sure.
And because of this eagerness, she quite overlooked the incongruity of
such a proposal coming from her father--an oversight which Mr. Vennor
had shrewdly anticipated and reckoned upon.

It was 7.30, and the train was clattering through the Denver yards,
measuring the final mile of the long westward run. Gertrude rose to go
and get ready.

"You needn't hurry," said her father; "the narrow-gauge train doesn't
leave for half an hour. I'll come for you when it is time to go."

He watched her go down the compartment and enter her stateroom without
stopping to speak to any of the others. Then he held up his finger for
the secretary.

"Harry, when the train stops, I want you should get off and see where
Brockway goes. You know him, and you might make an excuse to talk with
him. When you have found out, come and tell me. Do you understand?"

"Yes, sir," said Quatremain; and when he had kicked his pride into a
proper attitude of submission, he went about the errand.

XVI

THE MADDING CROWD

Twice a day, in the time whereof these things are written, the platform
of the Denver Union Depot gave the incoming migrant his first true
glimpse of the untrammelled West. A broad sea of planking, open to the
heavens--and likewise to the world at large--was the morning and evening
arena of a moving spectacle the like of which is not to be witnessed in
any well-ordered railway station of the self-contained East.

Trains headed north, east, south, and west, backed across the platform
and drawn apart in the midst to leave a passageway for the crowds; other
trains going and coming, with shouting yard-men for outriders to clear
the tracks; huge shifting pyramids of baggage piled high on tilting
trucks, dividing with the moving trains the attention of the dodging
multitude; the hurrying throngs imbued for the moment