ut her hands on his shoulders and made him face her squarely.

"Stuart, did you lose your temper?"

"I--I'm afraid I did--just at the last, you know. It's simply an
unspeakable state of affairs, Alicia, dear! At a moment when we should
be setting the whole world afire in a superhuman effort to flog this
piece of construction track into shape, your uncle paralyzes
everything!"

The constraining touch of her hands became almost a caress. "What shall
you do, Stuart? Is there nothing to be done?"

He took his resolution on the spur of the moment.

"Yes, thank heaven! Your uncle has got to find a printing press, or at
least a telegraph wire, before he can make my discharge effective.
Before he can do that, or until he does it, I'm going to pull the
throttle wide open and race that discharge circular, if I go to jail for
it, afterward! Who knows but I shall have time to save the day for the
company after all? Good-by, dearest. In twenty minutes I shall be riding
for the MacMorroghs' camp, and when I get there--"

"You are going to ride back?--alone? Oh, no, no!" she protested; and the
clinging arms held him.

"Why, Alicia, girl--see here: what do you imagine could happen to me?
Why, bless your loving heart, I've been tramping and riding this desert
more or less for two years! What has come over you?"

"I don't know; but--but--oh, me! you will think I am miserably weak and
foolish: but just as you said that, I seemed to see you lying in the
road with your horse standing over you--and you were--dead!"

"Nonsense!" he comforted. "I'll be back here to-morrow, alive and well;
but I mustn't lose a minute now. It's up to me to reach Horse Creek
before the news of the gold strike gets there. There'll be a stampede,
with every laborer on the line hoofing it for Copah. Good-by,
sweetheart, and--may I?" He took her face between his hands and did it
anyhow.

Five minutes later he was bargaining for a saddle horse at the one
livery stable in the camp, offering and paying the selling price of the
animal for the two days' hire. It was a rather sorry mount at that, and
when he was dragging it out into the street, Jack Benson, the youngest
member of his staff, rode up, that moment in from the tie-camp above Cow
Mountain.

"Don't dismount, Jack," he ordered curtly. "You're just in time to save
me eight or ten miles, when the inches are worth dollars. Ride for the
end-of-track and Frisbie on a dead run. Tell Dick to hold his men, i