by Zane Grey
“There’s the doctor now, Foley,” Glover answered. “Let him look you over carefully. Come this way.”
The voices receded. Listening to the talk, little of which she understood, a growing fear had come over Gertrude. Her eyes had pierced the gray light about her, and as she heard Glover walk away she rose hurriedly and stepped to the doorway to detain him. Glover had disappeared, but before her, stretched on the couch back of the table, lay McGraw. She knew him instantly, and so strangely did the gloom shroud his features that his steady eyes seemed looking straight at her. She divined that he had been brought back hurt. A chill passed over her, a horror. She hesitated a moment, and, fascinated, stepped closer; then she knew she was staring at the dead.
Terror-stricken and with sinking strength she made her way to the hotel and slipped up to the parlor. Throwing off her wraps she went to the window; Glover was coming up the street. There was only a moment in which to collect herself. She hastened to her bedroom, wet her forehead with cologne, and at her mirror her fingers ran tremblingly over the coils of her hair. She caught up a fresh handkerchief for her girdle, looked for an instant appealingly into her own eyes and closed them to think. Glover rapped.
She met him with a smile that she knew would stagger his fond eyes. She drugged his ear with a low-voiced greeting. “You are late, dearest.”
He looked at her and caught her hands. As his head bent she let her lips lie in his kiss, and let his arm find her waist as he kissed her deeply again. They walked together toward the fireplace, and when she saw the sadness of his face fear in her heart gave way to pity. “What is it?” she whispered. “Tell me.”
“The car has come with Doubleday and McGraw, Gertrude. The wreck was terribly fatal. Morris Blood must have jumped from the cab. The track I have told you is blasted there out of the cheek of the mountain, and it’s impossible to tell what his fate may be: but if he is alive I must find him. There is a good hope, I believe, for Morris; he is a man to squeeze through on a narrow chance. And Gertrude—I couldn’t tell you if I didn’t think you had a right to know everything I know. It breaks my heart to speak of it—McGraw is dead.”
“I am so glad you told me the truth,” she trembled, “for I knew it—”
“Knew it?” She confessed, hastily, how her anxiety had led her to his office, and of the terrible shock she had brought on herself. “But now I know you would not deceive me,” she added; “that is why I love you, because you are always honest and true. And do you love me, as you have told me, more than all the world?”
“More than all the world, Gertrude. Why do you look so? You are trembling.”
“Have you come to say good-by?”
“Only for a day or two, darling: till I can find Morris, then I come straight back to you.”
“You, too, may be killed?”
“No, no.”
“But I heard the man telling you you would go to your death if you attempted to cross that hill with a plough. Be honest with me; you are risking your life.”
“Only as I have risked it almost every day since I came into the mountains.”
“But now—now—doesn’t it mean something else? Think what it means to me—your life. Think what will become of me if you should be killed in trying to open that hill—if you should fall over a precipice as Morris Blood has fallen and lies now probably dead. Don’t go. Don’t go, this time. You have promised me you would leave the mountains, haven’t you? Don’t risk all, dearest, all I have on earth, in an attempt that may utterly fail and add one more precious life to the lives now sacrificed. You do heed me, darling, don’t you?”
She had disengaged herself to plead; to look directly up into his perplexed eyes. He leaned an arm on the mantel, staggered. His eyes followed hers in every word she spoke, and when she ceased he stared blankly at the fire.
“Heed you?” he answered, haltingly. “Heed you? You are all in the world that I have to heed. My only wish is your happiness; to die for it, Gertrude, wouldn’t be much—”
“All, all I ask is that you will live for it.”
“Worthless as I am, I have asked you to put that happiness in my keeping—do you think your lightest word could pass me unheeded? But to this, my dearest Gertrude, every instinct of manhood binds me—to go to my friend in danger.”
“If you go you will take every desperate chance to accomplish your end. Ah, I know you better than you know yourself. Ab, Ab, my darling, my lover, listen to me. Don’t; don’t go.”
When he spoke she would not have known his voice. “Can I let him die there like a dog on the mountain side? Can’t you see what I haven’t words to explain as you could explain—the position it puts me in? Don’t sob. Don’t be afraid; look at me. I’ll come back to you, darling.”
She turned her tearless eyes to the mountains. “Back! Yes. I see the end. My lover will come back—come back dead. And I shall try to kiss his brave lips back to life and they will speak no more. And I shall stand when they take him from me, lonely and alone. My father that I have estranged—my foster-mother that I have withstood—my sister that I have repelled—will their tears flow for me then? And for this I broke from my traditions and cast away associations, gave up all my little life, stood alone against my family, poured out my heart to these deserts, these mountains, and now—they rob me of my all—and this is love!”
He stood like a broken man. “God help me, have I laid on your dear head the curse of my own life? Must you, too, suffer because our perils force us lightly to pawn our lives one for another? One night in that yard”—he pointed to the window—“I stood between the rails with a switch engine running me down. I knew nothing of it. There was no time to speak, no time to think—it was on me. Had Blood left me there one second I never should have looked into your dear face. Up on the hill with Hailey and Brodie, under the gravel and shale, I should never have cost your heart an ache like this. Better the engine had struck me then and spared you now—”
“No, I say, no!” she exclaimed, wildly. “Better this moment together than a lifetime apart!”
“—For me he threw himself in front of the drivers. This moment is mine and yours because he gave his right hand for it—shall I desert him now he needs me? And so a hundred times and in a hundred ways we gamble with death and laugh if we cheat it: and our poor reward is only sometimes to win where far better men have failed. So in this railroad life two men stand, as he and I have stood, luck or ill-luck, storm or fair weather, together. And death speaks for one; and whichever he calls it is ever the other must answer. And this—is duty.”
“Then do your duty.”
Distinctly, and terrifying in their unexpectedness, came the words from the farther end of the parlor. They turned, stunned. Gertrude’s father was crossing the room. He raised his hand to dispel Glover’s sudden angry look. “I was lying on the couch; your voices roused me and I could not escape. You have put clearly the case you stand in,” he spoke to Glover, “and I have intervened only to spare both of you useless agony of argument. The question that concerns you two and me is not at this moment up for decision; the other question is, and it is for you, my daughter, now, to play the woman. I have tried as I could to shield you from rough weather. You have left port without consulting me, and the storms of womanhood are on you. Sir, when do you start?”
“My engine is waiting.”
“Then ask your people to attach my car. You can make equally good time, and since for better or worse we have cut into this game we will see it out together.”
Gertrude threw her arms around her father’s neck with a happy sob as Glover left. “Oh daddy, daddy. If you only knew him!”
CHAPTER XXI
PILOT
“There are mountains a man can do business with,” muttered Bucks in the private car, his mustache drooping broadly above his reflecting words. “Mountains that will give
and take once in a while, play fair occasionally. But Pilot has fought us every inch of the way since the day we first struck a pick into it. It is savage and unrelenting. I’d rather negotiate with Sitting Bull for a right of way through his private bathroom than to ask an easement from Pilot for a tamarack tie. I don’t know why it was ever called Pilot: if I named it, it should be Sitting Bull. What the Sioux were to the white men, what the Spider Water is to the bridgemen, that, and more, Pilot has been to the mountain men.
“There was no compromise with Pilot even after we got in on it. Snowslides, washouts, bowlders, forest-fires—and yet the richest quartz mines in the world lie behind it. This little branch, Mr. Brock, forty-eight miles, pays the operating expenses of the whole mountain division, and has done so almost since the day it was opened. But I’d rather lose the revenue ten times every year than to lose Morris Blood.” The second vice-president was talking to Mr. Brock. Their car was just rounding the curve into the gap in front of Mount Pilot.
“What do you think of Blood’s chances?” asked Mr. Brock.
“I don’t know. A mountain man has nine lives.”
“What does Glover think?”
“He doesn’t say.”
“Who built this line?”
“Two pretty good men ran the first thirty miles, but neither of them could give me a practicable line south of the gap; this last eighteen miles up and down and around Pilot was Glover’s first work in the mountains. It’s engineering. Every trick ever played in the Rockies, and one or two of Brodie’s old combinations in the Andes, they tell me, are crowded into these eighteen miles. There, there’s old Sitting Bull in all his clouds and his glory.”
Glover had left the car at Sleepy Cat, going ahead with the relief train. Picked men from every district on the division had been assembling all the afternoon to take up the search for the missing superintendent. Section men from the Sweetgrass wastes, and bridgemen from the foothills, roadmasters from the Heart Mountains—home of the storm and the snow—and Rat Cañon trackwalkers that could spot a break in the dark under twelve inches of ballast; Morgan, the wrecker, and his men, and the mountain linemen with their foreman, old Bill Dancing—fiend drunk and giant sober—were scattered on Mount Pilot, while a rotary ahead of a battery of big engines was shoved again and again up the snow-covered hill.
Anxious to get the track open in the belief that Blood could best be got at from beyond the S bridge, Glover, standing with the branch roadmaster, Smith Young, on the ledge above the engines directed the fight for the hill. He had promised Gertrude he would keep out of the cab, and far across the curve below he could see the Brock car, where Bucks was directing the search on the eastern side of the gulch.
Callahan and the linemen were spreading both ways through the timber on the plateau opposite, but the snow made the work extremely difficult, and the short day allowed hardly more than a start. On the hill Glover’s men advanced barely a hundred feet in three hours: darkness spread over the range with no sign of the missing man, and with the forebodings that none could shake off of what the night’s exposure, even if he were uninjured, might mean.
Supper was served to the men in the relief trains, and outside fires were forbidden by Glover, who asked that every foot of the track as far as the gap be patrolled all night.
It was nearly ten o’clock when Glover, supperless, reached the car with his dispositions made for the night. While he talked with the men, Clem, the star cook of the Brock family, under special orders grilled a big porterhouse steak and presently asked him back to the dining-table, where, behind the shaded candles, Gertrude waited.
They sat down opposite each other; but not until Glover saw there were two plates instead of one, and learned that Gertrude had eaten no dinner because she was waiting for him, did he mutter something about all that an American girl is capable of in the way of making a man grateful and happy. There was nothing to hurry them back to the other end of the car, and they did not rejoin Mr. Brock and Bucks, who were smoking forward, until eleven o’clock. Callahan came in afterward, and sitting together Mr. Brock and Gertrude listened while the three railroad men planned the campaign for the next day.
Parting late, Glover said good-night and left with Callahan to inspect the rotary. The fearful punishment of the day’s work on the knives had shown itself, and since dark, relays of mechanics from the Sleepy Cat shops had been busy with the cutting gear, and the companion plough had already been ordered in from the eighth district.
Glover returned to the car at one o’clock. The lights were low, and Clem, a night-owl, fixed him in a chair near the door. For an hour everything was very still, then Gertrude, sleeping lightly, heard voices. Glover walked back past the compartments; she heard him asking Clem for brandy—Bill Dancing, the lineman, had come with news.
The negro brought forward a decanter and Glover poured a gobletful for the old man, who shook from the chill of the night air.
“The boys claim it’s imagination,” Dancing, steadied by the alcohol, continued, “but it’s a fire way over below the second bridge. I’ve watched it for an hour; now you come.”
They went away and were gone a long time. Glover returned alone—Clem had disappeared; a girlish figure glided out of the gloom to meet him.
“I couldn’t sleep,” she whispered. “I heard you leave and dressed to wait.” She looked in the dim light as slight as a child, and with his hand at her waist he sunk on his knee to look up into her face. “How can I deserve it all?”
She blinded his upturned eyes in her hands, and not until she found her fingers were wet did she understand all he had tried to put into his words.
“Have you any news?” she murmured, as he rose.
“I believe they have found him.”
She clasped her hands. “Heaven be praised. Oh, is it sure?”
“I mean, Dancing, the old lineman, has seen his fire. At least, we are certain of it. We have been watching it two hours. It’s a speck of a blaze away across toward the mines. It never grows nor lessens, just a careful little campfire where fuel is scarce—as it is now with all the snow. We’ve lighted a big beacon on the hill for an answer, and at daybreak we shall go after him. The planning is all done and I am free now till we’re ready to start.”
She tried to make him lie down for a nap on the couch. He tried to persuade her to retire until morning, and in sweet contention they sat talking low of their love and their happiness—and of the hills a reckless girl romped over in old Allegheny, and of the shingle gunboats a sleepy-eyed boy launched in dauntless fleets upon the yellow eddies of the Mississippi; and of the chance that should one day bring boy and girl together, lovers, on the crest of the far Rockies.
Lights were moving up and down the hill when they rose from Clem’s astonishing breakfast.
“You will be careful,” she said. He had taken her in his arms at the door, and promising he kissed her and whispered good-by.
CHAPTER XXII
THE SOUTH ARÊTE
They had planned a quick relief with a small party, for every hour of exposure lessened the missing man’s chances. Glover chose for his companions two men: Dancing—far and away the best climber in the telegraph corps, and Smith Young, roadmaster, a chainman of Glover’s when he ran the Pilot line. Dancing and Glover were large men of unusual strength, and Young, lighter and smaller, had been known in a pinch to handle an ordinary steel rail. But above everything each—even Glover, the youngest—was a man of resource and experience in mountain craft.
They left the track near the twin bridges with only ropes and picks and skis, and carrying stimulants and food. Without any attempt to catch his trail from where they knew Blood must have started they made their way as directly as possible down the side of the mountain and in the direction of the gap. The stupendous difficulties of making headway across the eastern slope did not become apparent until the
rescuing party was out of sight of those they had left, but from where they floundered in ragged washouts or spread in line over glassy escarpments they could see far up the mountain the rotary throwing a white cloud into the sunshine and hear the far-off clamor of the engines on the hill.
Below the snow-field which they crossed they found the superintendent’s trail, and saw that his effort had been to cross the gap at that point and make his way out toward the western grade, where an easy climb would have brought him to the track; or where by walking some distance he could reach the track without climbing a foot, the grade there being nearly four percent.
They saw, too, why he had been forced to give up that hope, for what would have been difficult for three fresh men with shoes was an impossibility for a spent man in the snow alone. They knew that what they had covered in two hours had probably cost him ten, for before they had followed him a dozen feet they saw that he was dragging a leg; farther, the snow showed stains and they crossed a field where he had sat down and bandaged his leg after it had bled for a hundred yards.
The trail began, as they went on, to lose its character. Whether from weakness or uncertainty Blood’s steps had become wandering, and they noticed that he paid less attention to directness, but shunned every obstacle that called for climbing, struggling great distances around rough places to avoid them. They knew it meant that he was husbanding failing strength and was striving to avoid reopening his wound.
Twice they marked places in which he had sat to adjust his bandages, and the strain of what they read in the snow quickened their anxiety. Since that day Smith Young, superintendent now of the mountain division, has never hunted, because he could never afterward follow the trail of a wounded animal.
They found places where he had hunted for fuel, and firing signals regularly they reached the spot where he had camped the night before, and saw the ashes of his fire. He was headed south; not because there was more hope that way—there was less—but as if he must keep moving, and that were easiest. A quarter of a mile below where he had spent the night they caught sight of a man sitting on a fallen tree resting his leg. The next moment three men were in a tumbling race across the slope, and Blood, weakly hurrahing, fainted in Glover’s arms.