"_Sir!_" said Ellinor then. "How dare you?" Then she turned the other
cheek. "Good-by!" she whispered, and fled away to the ballroom.
Mr. Bransford, in the shadows, scratched his head dubiously.
"Her Christian name was Ellinor," he muttered. "Ellinor! H'm--Ellinor!
Very appropriate name.... Very!... And I don't know yet where she
lives!"
He wandered disconsolately away to the garden wall, forgetting the
discarded noseguard.
CHAPTER VI
THE ISLE OF ARCADY
"Then the moon shone out so broad and good
That the barn-fowl crowed:
And the brown owl called to his mate in the wood
_That a dead man lay in the road_!"
--WILL WALLACE HARNEY.
Arcadia's assets were the railroad, two large modern sawmills, the
climate and printer's ink. The railroad found it a patch of bare ground,
six miles from water; put in successively a whistling-post, a signboard,
a depot, townsite papers and a water-main from the Alamo; and, when the
townsite papers were confirmed, established machine shops and made the
new town the division headquarters and base for northward building.
The railroad then set up the sawmills, primarily to get out ties and
timbers for its own lanky growth, and built a spur to bring the forest
down from Rainbow to the mills. The word "down" is used advisedly.
Arcadia nestled on the plain under the very eavespouts of Rainbow Range.
The branch, following with slavish fidelity the lines of a twisted
corkscrew, took twenty-seven miles, mostly tunnel and trestlework, to
clamber to the logging camps, with a minimum grade that was purely
prohibitive and a maximum that I dare not state; but there was a rise of
six thousand feet in those twenty-seven miles. You can figure the
average for yourself. And if the engine should run off the track at the
end of her climb she would light on the very roundhouse where she took
breakfast, and spoil the shingles.
Yes, that was some railroad. There was a summer hotel--Cloudland--on the
summit, largely occupied by slackwire performers. Others walked up or
rode a horse. They used stem-winding engines, with eight vertical
cylinders on the right side and a shaft like a steamboat, with beveled
cogwheel transmission on the axles. And they haven't had a wreck on that
branch to date. No matter how late a train is, when an engine sees the
tail-lights of her caboose ahead of her she stops and sends out flagmen.
The railroad, under th
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