not
be a slip anywhere now. The road must be safe; he must make it safe."
She repeated her expression.

"An accident now that any sort of human foresight could prevent would
ruin him."

"Oh, dear, it's an awful strain on us... on him," she corrected. "He
simply can't be everywhere to see that everything is right and everybody
careful. And besides, there's the finances of the road to keep in shape.
He had to go to Montreal to-day to see about that."

She leaned over toward me in her eager interest.

"I don't see how he can sleep with the thing on him. The big trains must
go through on time, and every workman and every piece of machinery must
be right as a clock. I get in a panic. I asked him to-day if he thought
he could run a railroad like that, like a machine, everything in place
on the second, and he said, 'Sure, Mike!'"

I laughed.

"'Sure, Mike,"' I said, "is the spirit in which the world is conquered."

And then the strange attraction of these two persons for one another
arose before me; this big, crude, virile, direct son of the hustling
West, and this delicate, refined, intellectual daughter of New England.
The ancestors of the man had been the fighting and the building pioneer.
And those of the girl, reflective people, ministers of the gospel and
counselors at law. Marion's grandfather had been a writer on the law.
Warfield on Evidence, had been the leading authority in this country.
And this ambitious girl had taken a special course in college to fit
her to revise her grandfather's great work. There was no grandson to
undertake this labor, and she had gone about the task herself. She would
not trust the great book to outside hands. A Warfield had written it,
and a Warfield should keep the edition up. Her revision was now in the
hands of a publisher in Boston, and it was sound and comprehensive, the
critics said; the ablest textbook on circumstantial evidence in America.
I looked in a sort of wonder at this girl, carried off her feet by a
tawny barbarian!

Marion was absorbed in the thing; and I understood her anxiety. But the
most pressing danger, she did not seem to realize.

It lay, I thought, in the revenge of a discharged workman. Clinton
Howard had to drop any number of incompetent persons, and they wrote him
all sorts of threatening letters, I had been told. With all the awful
things that happen over the country some of these angry people might do
anything. There are always some half-mad people