hed.

This time he laughed with her, forgetting his troubles for the moment.

"I guess it is, in the last analysis," he said. And then: "I'm sorry to
keep you waiting so long, if you are anxious to get back to the Nadia.
But I warned you beforehand. I must keep my appointment with Frisbie. Do
you see anything of him?" This because she was again sweeping the
western wilderness with the field-glass.

"What am I to look for?"

"The smoke of an engine."

She focused the glass on the gorge at the foot of the pass. "I see it!"
she cried. "A little black beetle of a thing just barely crawling. Now
it is turning into the first curve of the great loop."

"Then we shan't have very much longer to wait. Do you find the
ten-thousand-foot breeze chilly? Turn up the collar of your coat and
we'll walk a bit."

It was his first appreciable concern for her comfort, and she gave him
full credit. Coquetry was no part of Miss Alicia's equipment, but no
woman likes to be utterly neglected on the care-taking side, or to be
transformed ruthlessly into a man-companion whose well-being may be
brusquely ignored. And this young athlete in brown duck shooting-coat
and service leggings, who was patiently doing a sentry-go beside her up
and down the newly-laid track at the summit of Plug Pass, was quite a
different person from the abashed apologist who had paid for her dinner
in the dining-car on the night of purse-snatchings.

XVI

THE TRUTHFUL ALTITUDES

A low, tremulous shudder was beginning to lift itself, like the distant
growling of thunder, upon the tinnient air of the high summit. A moment
later a heavy construction engine shot around the final curve in the
westward climb, with Michael Gallagher hanging out of the cab window on
the engineer's side.

The two at the summit faced about to watch the approach. The big engine
came lumbering and lurching dangerously over the unsurfaced track in a
fierce spurt for the mountain-top, its stack vomiting fire, its
cylinder-cocks hissing shrilly, and its exhaust ripping the spheral
silences like the barking detonations of a machine-gun.

Ford glanced aside at his companion; her expressive face was a study in
delighted animation and he decided that he had again misjudged the
president's niece. She was beating time softly with her gloved hands and
singing the song of the locomotive:

"'With a michnai--ghignai--shtingal! Yah! Yah! Yah!
Ein--zwei--drei--Mutter! Yah! Yah! Yah!
She