as humming softly with a
note like the distant swarming of bees, and from the dancehall in
Argentine the snort of a trombone and the tinkling clang of a cracked
piano floated out upon the frosty night air.

Winton turned to go back. The windows of the Rosemary were all dark,
and there was nothing to stay for. So he thought, at all events; but
if he had not been musing abstractedly upon things widely separated
from his present surroundings, he might have remarked two tiny stars
of lantern-light high on the placer ground above the embankment; or,
failing the sight, he might have heard the dull, measured _slumph_
of a churn-drill burrowing deep in the frozen earth of the slope.

As it was, a pair of brown eyes blinded him, and the tones of a voice
sweeter than the songs of Oberon's sea-maid filled his ears. Wherefore
he neither saw nor heard; and taking the short cut across the mouth of
the lateral gulch back to camp, he boarded the dinkey and went to bed
without disturbing Adams.

The morning of the day to come broke clear and still, with the stars
paling one by one at the pointing finger of the dawn, and the
frost-rime lying thick and white like a snowfall of erect and
glittering needles on iron and steel and wood.

Obedient to orders, the bridge-builders were getting out their
hand-car at the construction camp, the wheels shrilling merrily on the
frosted rails, and the men stamping and swinging their arms to start
the sluggish night-blood. Suddenly, like the opening gun of a battle,
the dull rumble of a mighty explosion trembled upon the still air,
followed instantly by a sound as of a passing avalanche.

Winton was out and running up the track before the camp was fairly
aroused. What he saw when he gained the hither side of the lateral
gulch was a sight to make a strong man weep. A huge landslide,
starting from the frozen placer ground high up on the western
promontory, had swept every vestige of track and embankment into the
deep bed of the creek at a point precisely opposite Mr. Somerville
Darrah's private car.

VII. THE MAJESTY OF THE LAW

Virginia was up and dressed when the sullen shock of the explosion
set the windows jarring in the Rosemary.

She hurried out upon the observation platform and so came to look
upon the ruin wrought by the landslide while the dust-like smoke of
the dynamite still hung in the air.

"Rather unlucky for our friends the enemy," said a colorless voice
behind her; and