Winton was silent for a moment. Finally he said: “I hope you did what you could to make it pleasant for her.”
Adams chuckled reminiscently. “Had to do it to make my day-before-yesterday lie hold water. And she was immensely taken with the scrawls, especially with one of them.”
“I suppose I don't need to ask which one.”
Adams' grin was a measure of his complacence.
“Took it, or tore it up, I forget which.”
The other took the last hint of laughter out of his eyes before he said solemnly: “You'll never know how thankful I was that you were twenty miles away.”
Winton's cup was full, and he turned the talk abruptly to the industrial doings and accomplishments of the day. Adams made a verbal report which led him by successive steps up to the twilight hour when he had stood with Branagan on the brink of the placer drain, but, strangely enough, there was no stirring of memory to recall the incident of the upward-climbing miners.
When Winton rose he said something about mounting a night guard on the engine, which was kept under steam at all hours; and shortly afterward he left the dinkey ostensibly to do it, declining Adams' offer of company. But once out-of-doors he climbed straight to the operator's tent on the snow-covered slope. Carter had turned in, but he sat up in his bunk at the noise of the intrusion.
“That you, Mr. Winton? Want to send something?” he asked.
“No, go to sleep. I'll write a wire and leave it for you to send in the morning.”
He sat down at the packing-case instrument table and wrote out a brief report of the day's progress in track-laying for the general manager's record. But when Carter's regular breathing told him he was alone he pushed the pad aside, took down the sending-hook, and searched until he had found the original copy of the message which had reached him at the moment of cataclysms in the lobby of the Buckingham.
“Um,” he said, and his heart grew warm within him. “It's just about as I expected: Morty didn't have anything whatever to do with it--except to sign and send it as she commanded him to.” And the penciled sheet was folded carefully and filed in permanence in the inner breast pocket of his brown duck shooting-coat.
The moon was rising behind the eastern mountain when he extinguished the candle and went out. Below lay the chaotic construction camp buried in silence and in darkness save for the lighted windows of the dinkey. He was not quite ready to go back to Adams, and after making a round of the camp and bidding the engine watchman keep a sharp lookout against a possible night surprise, he set out to walk over the newly-laid track of the day.