she had an uncomfortable feeling that Jastrow had
been lying in wait for her.

She turned upon him quickly.

"Was it an accident, Mr. Jastrow?"

"How could it be anything else?" he inquired mildly.

"I don't know. But there was an explosion: I heard it."

"It is horribly unfair," she went on. "I understand the sheriff is
here. Couldn't he have prevented this?"

The secretary's rejoinder was a platitude: "Everything is fair in
love or war."

"But this is neither," she retorted.

"Think not?" he said coolly. "Wait, and you'll see. And a word in
your ear, Miss Carteret: you are one of us, you know, and you mustn't
be disloyal. I know what you did yesterday after you read those
telegrams."

Virginia's face became suddenly wooden. Until that moment it had not
occurred to her that Jastrow's motive in showing her the two telegrams
might have been carefully calculated.

"I have never given you the right to speak to me that way, Mr.
Jastrow," she said, with the faintest possible emphasis on the
courtesy prefix; and with that she turned from him to focus her
field-glass on the construction camp below.

At the Utah stronghold all was activity of the fiercest. Winton had
raced back with his news of the catastrophe, and the camp was alive
with men clustering like bees and swarming upon the flat-cars of the
material-train to be taken to the front.

While she looked, studiously ignoring the man behind her, Virginia
saw the big octopod engine clamoring up the grade. In a twinkling
the men were off and at work.

Virginia's color rose and the brown eyes filled swiftly. One part
of her ideal was courage of the sort that rises the higher for
reverses. But at the instant she remembered the secretary, and, lest
he should spy upon her emotion, she turned and took refuge in the
car.

In the Rosemary the waiter was laying the plates for breakfast, and
Bessie and the Reverend William were at the window, watching the
stirring industry battle now in full swing on the opposite slope.
Virginia joined them.

"Isn't it a shame!" she said. "Of course, I want our side to win;
but it seems such a pity that we can't fight fairly."

Calvert said, "Isn't what a shame?" thereby eliciting a crisp
explanation from Virginia in which she set well-founded suspicion
in the light of fact.

The Reverend Billy shook his head.

"Such things may be within the law--of business; but they will surely
breed bad blood--"

The interruption was the