Glover, waking wide, turned to the window. "Where's the wind, Sid?"
"Thirty at Creston; sixty when we left MacDill at noon."
"They've been getting the freights into division since noon. There'll be something doing to-night on the range. They sent stock warnings everywhere this morning, but they can't begin to protect the stock between here and Medicine in one day. Pulling hard, isn't she? We're not making up anything."
The porter was lighting the lamps. While they talked it had grown quite dark. Losing time every mile of the way, the train, frost-crusted to the eyelids, got into Sleepy Cat at half-past six o'clock; four hours late.
The crowded yard, as they pulled through it, showed the tie-up of the day's traffic. Long lines of freight cars filled the trackage, and overloaded switch engines struggled with ever-growing burdens to avert the inevitable blockade of the night. Glover's anxiety, as he left the train at the station, was as to whether he could catch anything on the Glen Tarn branch to take him up to the Springs that night, for there he was resolved to get before morning if he had to take an engine for the run.
As he started up the narrow hall leading to the telegraph office he heard the rustle of skirts above. Someone was descending the stairway, and with his face in the light he halted.
"What in the world--" he began. His broken voice was very natural, she thought, but there was amazement in his utterance. He noticed there was little color in her face; the deep boa of fur nestling about her throat might account for that.
"What a chance that I should meet you!" she exclaimed, her back hard against the side wall, for the hall was narrow and brought them face to face. She spoke on. "Did you get my----?"
"Did I?" he echoed slowly; "I have travelled every minute since yesterday afternoon to get here----"
Her uneasy laugh interrupted him. "It was hardly worth while, all that."
"--and I was just going up to find out about getting to Glen Tarn."
"Glen Tarn! I left Glen Tarn this afternoon all alone to go to Medicine Bend--papa is there, did you know? He came yesterday with all the directors. Our car was attached for me to the afternoon train coming down." She was certainly wrought up, he thought. "But when we reached here the train I should have taken for Medicine Bend had not come----"