reproachfully.

"Certainly. You didn't give him enough to do. He was happy and contented
while you kept him hard at work. But after the bonds were placed and the
money raised--"

"I'm a miserable sinner!" Ford confessed. "And I had promised you, too!
But the battle has been so fierce at this end of the line; and I
couldn't be in two places at one time. Your brother should have been
made first vice-president, instead of North. Perhaps we can bring it
about yet--if you don't call it all off."

"There it is again," she retorted. "You are dragging me in--and trying
to bribe me, too!"

"God forbid!" he said, so earnestly that she forgave him. And then: "I
wish your brother were here--now."

"So do I," she admitted. Then she told him of the wire summons sent from
Denver, and of the shadowy hope she had based upon it.

"Where was your brother then?" he asked.

"I don't know, positively. I hope he was in New York. He was to come
over in the _Campania_, in time for the shooting at Mount Ptarmigan."

"You've had no word from him?"

"None."

They were up with the track-layers, now, in a country of huge bare hills
and high-lying, waterless valleys; and the president had halted the
caravan to give his guests a chance to see a modern railroad in the
actual throes of evolution.

In a specialist in the trade, Ford's genius might have invoked
enthusiasm. Speed was the end to which all of the young engineer's
inventive powers had been directed; and the pace was furious. On the
leveled grade ahead of the track-laying train an army of sweating
laborers marched and counter-marched like trained soldiers, placing the
cross-ties in position. On a train of specially constructed flat-cars
another army was bolting together a long section of track, clamping the
double line of rails at intervals to hold them to gauge. At the word,
"Ready!" a hauling chain, passing through an anchored pulley-block far
up the grade and back to the freed engine of the construction train, was
made fast to the forward end of the bolted section; a second word of
command, and the engine backed swiftly, dragging the prepared section
off over the rollers of the flat-cars and into place on the ties. With
the clanging fall of the final pair of rails, a third army,
spike-drivers these, fell upon the newly placed steel, shouting their
chantey as they swung the great pointed hammers; and in the midst of
this fresh turmoil the train, with its brigade of bolters def