ee more in this wilderness than you have ever been able to
make any one else see. Can I see it with the glass?"

"Hardly," he smiled. "I was trying to tell your brother of the
magnificent possibilities of the country lying between this and that
farthest mountain range; the country we are going to open up. It was a
gospel I had been trying to preach to the directors, but none of them
believed--not even your uncle."

"I see nothing but vastness and cold gray grandeurs," she said, adding:
"and the very bigness of it makes me feel like a mere atom, or a
molecule--whichever is the smaller."

"Yet it is a new empire in the rough," he rejoined, with a touch of the
old enthusiasm, "waiting only for the coming of this"--putting his foot
again upon the steel of the new railroad line. "What you are looking at
has been called a part of the Great American Desert--the most forbidding
part, in the stories of the early explorers. Notwithstanding, there will
come a time when you can focus your glass here on this mountain and look
out over what the promoters will then be advertising as a 'peopled
paradise,' and these 'logs of wood in a row, with two strands of iron to
fasten them together' will bring it to pass."

There was a flash of the enthusiast's fire in the cool gray eyes to go
with the words, and Miss Adair wondered at it. He had stood for her as
an embodiment of things practical and prosaic; as one too keenly
watchful and alert on the purely industrial side to be in any sense a
dreamer of dreams. Some part of her thought slipped into speech.

"No, I am not an enthusiast," he denied, in reply to her charge. "At
bottom, I'm only an engineer, with an ambition to build railroads. But
I should have learned no more than half of my trade if I couldn't tell
where it would be profitable to build them."

"Never mind: you seem to have convinced Uncle Sidney and the directors
finally," she commented.

"No; your uncle and the directors are not empire builders--meaning to
be," he objected. "They are after the present visible dollar in a
western outlet for the Pacific Southwestern. If we reach Green Butte
before our competitors can broaden their narrow gauge to that point, we
shall have a practicable line from Chicago to the Pacific coast."

"I understand," she said. "But yours is the higher ideal--the true
American ideal."

"It's business," he asserted.

"Well, isn't business the very heart and soul of the American ideal?"
she laug