The Western Romance MEGAPACK ®: 20 Classic Tales

by Zane Grey

  Marie was still talking to him. “Why haven’t you heard? I thought sister would have told you. The doctor says I gained faster here than anywhere between the two oceans, and we are all to spend six weeks up at Glen Tarn Springs. Papa is going East and coming back after us, and we shall expect you to come to the Springs very often.”

  The stage was starting. Gertrude faced backward as she sat. She could see Glover’s salutation, and she waved a glove. He was as utterly confused as she could desire. She saw him rejoin his companion engineer near where lay the shoveller with the covered face, and the thought of the terrible accident depressed her. As she last saw Glover he was pointing at the faulty bank, and she knew that the two men were planning again for the safety of the men.

  About Glen Tarn, now quite the best known of the Northern mountain resorts, there is no month like October: no sun like the October sun, and no frost like the first that stills the aspen. Moreover, the travel is done, the parks are deserted, the mountains robing for winter. In October, the horse, starting, shrinks under his rider, for the lion, always moving, never seen, is following the game into the valleys, leaving the grizzly to beat his stubborn retreat from the snow line alone.

  Starting from the big hotel in a new direction every day the Pittsburgers explored the valleys and the cañons, for the lake and the springs nestle in the Pilot Mountains and the scenery is everywhere new. Mount Pilot itself rises loftily to the north, and from its sides may be seen every peak in the range.

  One day, for a novelty, the whole party went down to Medicine Bend, nominally on a shopping expedition, but really on a lark. Medicine Bend is the only town within a day’s distance of Glen Tarn Springs where there are shops; and though the shopping usually ended in a chorus of jokes, the trip on the main line trains, which they caught at Sleepy Cat, was always worth while, and the dining-car, with an elaborate supper in returning, was a change from the hotel table.

  Sometimes Gertrude and Mrs. Whitney went together to the headquarters town—Gertrude expecting always to encounter Glover. When some time had passed, her failure to get a glimpse of him piqued her. One day with her aunt going down they met Conductor O’Brien. He was more than ready to answer questions, and fortunately for the reserve that Gertrude loved to maintain, Mrs. Whitney remarked they had not seen Mr. Glover for some time.

  “No one has seen much of him for two weeks; he had a little bad luck,” explained Conductor O’Brien.

  “Indeed?”

  “Three weeks ago he was up at Crab Valley. They had a cave-in on the irrigation canal and two or three men got caught under a coal platform near the steam shovel. Glover was close by when it happened. He got his back under the timbers until they could get the men out and broke two of his ribs. He went home that night without knowing of it, but a couple of days afterward he sneezed and found it out right away. Since then he’s been doing his work in a plaster cast.”

  Their return train that day was several hours behind time and Gertrude and her aunt were compelled to go up late to the American House for supper. A hotel supper at Medicine Bend was naturally the occasion of some merriment, and the two diverted themselves with ordering a wild assortment of dishes. The supper hour had passed, the dining-room had been closed, and they were sitting at their dessert when a late comer entered the room. Gertrude touched her aunt’s arm—Glover was passing.

  Mrs. Whitney’s first impulse was to halt the silent engineer with one of her imperative words. To think of him was to think only of his easily approachable manner; but to see him was indistinctly to recall something of a dignity of simplicity. She contented herself with a whisper. “He doesn’t see us.”

  At the lower end of the room Glover sat down. Almost at once Gertrude became conscious of the silence. She handled her fork noiselessly, and the interval before a waitress pushed open the swinging kitchen door to take his order seemed long. The Eastern girl watched narrowly until the waitress flounced out, and Glover, shifting his knife and his fork and his glass of water, spread his limp napkin across his lap, and resting his elbow on the table supported his head on his hand.

  The surroundings had never looked so bare as then, and a sense of the loneliness of the shabby furnishings filled her. The ghastliness of the arc-lights, the forbidding whiteness of the walls, and the penetrating odors of the kitchen seemed all brought out by the presence of a man alone.

  Mrs. Whitney continued to jest, but Gertrude responded mechanically. Glover was eating his supper when the two rose from their table, and Mrs. Whitney led the way toward him.

  “So, this is the invalid,” she said, halting abruptly before him. “Mrs. Whitney!” exclaimed Glover, trying hastily to rise as he caught sight of Gertrude.

  “Will you please be seated?” commanded Mrs. Whitney. “I insist—”

  He sat down. “We want only to remind you,” she went on, “that we hate to be completely ignored by the engineering department even when not officially in its charge.”

  “But, Mrs. Whitney, I can’t sit if you are to stand,” he answered, greeting Gertrude and her aunt together.

  “You are an invalid; be seated. Nothing but toast?” objected Mrs. Whitney, drawing out a chair and sitting down. “Do you expect to mend broken ribs on toast?”

  “I’m well mended, thank you. Do I look like an invalid?”

  “But we heard you were seriously hurt.” He laughed. “And want to suggest Glen Tarn as a health resort.”

  “Unfortunately, the doctor has discharged me. In fact, a broken rib doesn’t entitle a man to a lay-off. I hope your sister continues to improve?” he added, looking at Gertrude.

  “She does, thank you. Mrs. Whitney and I have been talking of the day we met you at the irrigation—” he did not help her to a word—“works,” she continued, feeling the slight confusion of the pause. “You”—he looked at her so calmly that it was still confusing—“you were hurt before we met you and we must have seemed unconcerned under the circumstances. We speak often at Glen Tarn of the delightful weeks we spent in your mountain wilds last summer,” she added.

  Glover thanked her, but appeared absorbed in Mrs. Whitney’s attempt to disengage her eye-glasses from their holder, and Gertrude made no further effort to break his restraint. Mrs. Whitney talked, and Glover talked, but Gertrude reserved her bolt until just before their train started.

  He had gone with them, and they were standing on the platform before the vestibule steps of their Pullman car. As the last moment approached it was not hard to see that Glover was torn between Mrs. Whitney’s rapid-fire talk and a desire to hear something from Gertrude.

  She waited till the train was moving before she loosed her shaft. Mrs. Whitney had ascended the steps, the porter was impatient, Glover nervous. Gertrude turned with a smile and a totally bewildering cordiality on the unfortunate man. “My sister,” her glove was on the hand-rail, “sends some sort of a message to Mr. Glover every time I come to Medicine Bend—but the gist of them all is that she would be very”—the train was moving and they were stepping along with it—“glad to see you at Glen Tarn before—”

  “Gertrude,” screamed Mrs. Whitney, “will you get on?”

  Glover’s eyes were growing like target-lights.

  “—before we go East,” continued Gertrude. “So should I,” she added, throwing in the last three words most inexplicably, as she kept step with the engineer. But she had not miscalculated the effect.

  “Are you to go soon?” he exclaimed. The porter followed them helplessly with his stool. Mrs. Whitney wrung her hands, and Gertrude attempted to reach the lower tread of the car step.

  Someone very decidedly helped her, and she laughed and rose from his hands as lightly as to a stirrup. When she collected herself, after the pleasure of the spring, Mrs. Whitney was scolding her for her carelessness; but she was waving a glove from the vestibule at a big hat still lifted in the
dusk of the platform.

  CHAPTER XIV

  GLEN TARN

  October had not yet gone when they met again in a Medicine Bend street. Glover, leaving the Wickiup with Morris Blood, ran into Gertrude Brock coming out of an Indian curio-shop with Doctor Lanning. She began at once to talk to Glover. “Marie was regretting, yesterday, that you had not yet found your way to Glen Tarn.”

  The sun beat intensely on her black hat and her suit of gray. In her gloved hand she twirled the tip of her open sunshade on the pavement with deliberation and he shifted his footing helplessly. His heavy face never looked homelier than in sunshine, and she gazed at him with a calmness that was staggering. He muttered something about having been unusually busy.

  “We, too, have been,” smiled Gertrude, “making final preparations for our departure.”

  “Do you go so soon?” he exclaimed.

  “We are waiting only papa’s return now to say good-by to the mountains.” The way in which she put it stirred him as she had intended it should—uncomfortably.

  “I should certainly want to say good-by to your sister,” muttered Glover. But in saying even so little his naturally unsteady voice broke one extra tone, and when this happened it angered him.

  “You are not timid, are you?” continued Gertrude.

  “I think I am something of a coward.”

  “Then you shouldn’t venture,” she laughed, “Marie has a scolding for you.”

  Morris Blood had been telling Doctor Lanning that he and Glover were to go over to Sleepy Cat on the train the doctor and Gertrude were to take back to Glen Tarn. The two railroad men were just starting across the yard to inspect an engine, the 1018, which was to pull the limited train that day for the first time. It was a new monster, planned by the modest little Manxman, Robert Crosby, for the first district run. “Help her over the pass,” Crosby had whispered—the superintendent of motive power hardly ever spoke aloud—“and she’ll buck a headwind like a canvas-back. Give her decent weather, and on the Sleepy Cat trail she’ll run away with six, yes, eight Pullmans.”

  Doctor Lanning was curious to look over the new machine, the first to signalize the new ownership of the line, and Gertrude was quite ready to accept Blood’s invitation to go also.

  With the doctor under the superintendent’s wing, Gertrude, piloted by Glover, crossed the network of tracks, asking railroad questions at every step.

  Reaching the engine, she wanted to get up into the cab, to say that, before leaving the mountains forever, she had been once inside an engine. Glover, after some delay, procured a stepladder from the “rip” track, and with this the daughter of the magnate made an unusual but easy ascent to the cab. More than that, she made herself a heroine to every yardman in sight, and strengthened the new administration incalculably.

  She ignored a conventional offer of waste from the man in charge of the cab, who she was surprised to learn, after some sympathetic remarks on her part, was not the engineman at all. He was a man that had something to do with horses. And when she suggested it would be quite an event for so big an engine to go over the mountains for the first time, the hostler told her it had already been over a good many times.

  But Mr. Blood had an easy explanation for every confusing statement, and did not falter even when Miss Brock wanted to start the 1018 herself. He objected that she would soil her gloves, but she held them up in derision; plainly, they had already suffered. Some difficulty then arose because she could not begin to reach the throttle. Again, with much chaffing, the stepladder was brought into play, and steadied on it by Morris Blood, and coached by the hostler, the heiress to many millions grasped the throttle, unlatched it and pulled at the lever vigorously with both hands.

  The packing was new, but Gertrude persisted, the bar yielded, and to her great fright things began to hiss. The engine moved like a roaring leviathan, and the author of the mischief screamed, tried to stop it, and being helpless appealed to the unshaven man to help her. Glover, however, was nearest and shut off.

  It was all very exciting, and when on the turntable Gertrude was told by the doctor that her suit was completely ruined she merely held up both her blackened gloves, laughing, as Glover came up; and caught up her begrimed skirt and joined him with a flush on her cheeks as bright as a danger signal.

  Some fervor of the magical day, under those skies where autumn itself is only a heavier wine than spring, something of the deep breath of the mountain scene seemed to infect her.

  She walked at Glover’s side. She recalled with the slightest pretty mirth his fetching the ladder—the way in which he had crossed a flat car by planting the ladder alongside, mounting, pulling the steps after him, and descending on them to the other side.

  In her humor she faintly suggested his awkward competence in doing things, and he, too, laughed. As they crossed track after track she would place the toe of her boot on a rail glittering in the sun, and rising, balance an instant to catch an answer from him before going on. There was no haste in their manner. They had crossed the railroad yard, strangers; they recrossed it quite other. Their steps they retraced, but not their path. The path that led them that day together to the engine was never to be retraced.

  To worry Crosby’s new locomotive, Blood’s car had been ordered added to the westbound limited, but neither Glover nor Blood spent any time in the private car. The afternoon went in the Pullman with Gertrude Brock and Doctor Lanning. At dinner Glover did the ordering because he had earlier planned to celebrate the promotion, already known, of Morris Blood to the general superintendency.

  If there were few lines along which the construction engineer could shine he at least appeared to advantage as the host of his friend, since the ordering of a dinner is peculiarly a gentleman’s matter, and even the modest complement of wine which the occasion demanded, Glover toasted in a way that revealed the boyish loyalty between the two men.

  The spirit of it was so contagious that neither the doctor nor Gertrude made scruple of adding their congratulations. But the moments were fleeting and Glover, next day, could recall them up to one scene only. When Gertrude found she could not, even after a brave effort, ride with her back to the engine, and accepted so graciously Mr. Blood’s offer to change seats, it brought her beside Glover; after that his memory failed.

  In the morning he felt miserably overdone, as at Sleepy Cat a man might after running a preliminary half way to heaven. Moreover, when they parted he had, he remembered, undertaken to dine the following evening at the Springs.

  When he entered the apartments of the Pittsburg party at six o’clock, Mrs. Whitney reproached him for his absence during their month at Glen Tarn, and in Mrs. Whitney’s manner, peremptorily.

  “I’m sure we’ve missed seeing everything worth while about here,” she complained. Her annoyance put Glover in good humor. Marie met him with a gentler reproach. “And we go next week!”

  “But you’ve seen everything, I know,” he protested, answering both of them.

  “Whether we have or not, Mr. Glover should be penalized for his indifference,” suggested Marie. Doctor Lanning came in. “Compel him to show us something we haven’t seen around the lake,” suggested the doctor. “That he cannot do; then we have only to decide on his punishment.”

  “Oh, yes, I want to be on that jury,” said Gertrude, entering softly in black.

  “But is this Pittsburg justice?” objected Glover, rising at the spell of her eyes to the raillery. “Shouldn’t I have a try at the scenery end of the proposition before sentence is demanded?”

  “Justify quickly, then,” threatened Marie, as they started for the dining-room; “we are not trifling.”

  “Of course you’ve been here a month,” began Glover, when the party were seated.

  “Yes.”

  “Out every day.”

  “Yes.”

 
“The guides have all your money?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then I stake everything on a single throw—”

  “A professional,” interjected Doctor Lanning.

  “Only desperate gamesters stake all on a single throw,” said Gertrude warningly.

  “I am a desperate gamester,” said Glover, “and now for it. Have you seen the Devil’s Gap?”

  A chorus of derision answered.

  “The very first day—the very first trip!” cried Mrs. Whitney, raising her tone one note above every other protest.

  “And you staked all on so wretched a chance?” exclaimed Gertrude. “Why, Devil’s Gap is the stock feature of every guide, good, bad, and indifferent, at the Springs.”

  “I have staked more at heavier odds,” returned Glover, taking the storm calmly, “and won. Have you made but one trip, when you first came, do you say?”

  “The very first day.”

  “Then you haven’t seen Devil’s Gap. To see it,” he continued, “you must see it at night.”

  “At night?”

  “With the moon rising over the Spanish Sinks.”

  “Ah, how that sounds!” exclaimed Marie.

  “To-night we have full moon,” added Glover. “Don’t say too lightly you have seen Devil’s Gap, for that is given to but few tourists.”

  “Do not call us tourists,” objected Gertrude.

  “And from where did you see Devil’s Gap—The Pilot?”

  “No, from across the Tarn.”

  If the expression of Glover’s face, returning somewhat the ridicule heaped on him, was intended to pique the interest of the sightseers it was effective. He was restored, provisionally, to favor; his suggestion that after dinner they take horses for the ride up Pilot Mountain to where the Gap could be seen by moonlight was eagerly adopted, and Mrs. Whitney’s objection to dressing again was put down. Marie, fearing the hardship, demurred, but Glover woke to so lively interest, and promised the trip should be so easy that when she consented to go he made it his affair to attend directly to her comfort and safety.