by Zane Grey
If he frightened her she gave no sign. She held herself for an instant uncertain and aloof, though she could not but feel the heavy draught she made on his strength. The wind stung her cheeks; her breath caught again in her throat and she heard him implore her to turn her face, to turn it from the wind. He stumbled as he spoke, and as she shielded her face from the deadly cold, one hand slipped from her muff. Reaching around his head she drew his storm-cap more closely down with her fingers. When he thanked her she tried to speak and could not, but her glove rested an instant where the wind struck his cheek; then her head hid upon his shoulder and her arms wound slowly and tightly around his neck.
He kicked open the door of the hotel with one blow of his foot and set her down inside.
In the warm dark office, breathing unsteadily, they faced each other. “Can you, Gertrude, marry that man and break my heart?” He caught up her two hands with his words.
“No,” she answered, brokenly. “Are you sure you are not frozen—ears or cheeks or hands?”
“You won’t marry him, Gertrude, and break my heart? Tell me you won’t marry him.”
“No, I won’t.”
“Tell me again.”
“Shall I tell you everything?”
“If you have mercy for me as I have love for you.”
“I ran away from him to-night. He came out with the directors and telegraphed he would be at the Springs in the afternoon for his answer, and—I ran away. He has his answer long ago and I would not see him.”
“Brave girl!”
“Oh, I wasn’t brave, I was a dreadful coward. But I thought—”
“What?”
“—I could be brave, if I found as brave a man—as you.”
“Gertrude, if I kiss you I never can give you up. Do you understand what that means? I never in life or death can give you up, Gertrude, do you understand me?”
She was crying on his shoulder. “Oh, yes, I understand,” and he heard from her lips the maddening sweetness of his boy name. “I understand,” she sobbed. “I don’t care, Ab—if only—, you will be kind to me.”
It was only a moment later—her head had not yet escaped from his arm, for Glover found for the first time that it is one thing to get leave to kiss a lovely woman and wholly another to get the necessary action on the conscience-stricken creature—she had not yet, I say, escaped, when a locomotive whistle was borne from the storm faintly in on their ears. To her it meant nothing, but she felt him start. “What is it?” she whispered.
“The ploughs!”
“The ploughs?”
“The snow-ploughs that followed us. Twenty minutes behind—twenty minutes between us and death, Gertrude, in that blizzard, think of it. That must mean we are to live.”
The solemn thought naturally suggested, to Glover at least, a resumption of the status quo, but as he was locating, in the dark, there came from behind the stove a mild cough. The effect on the construction engineer of the whole blizzard was to that cough as nothing. Inly raging he seated Gertrude—indeed, she sunk quite faintly into a chair, and starting for the stove Glover dragged from behind it Solomon Battershawl. “What are you doing here?” demanded Glover, savagely.
“I’m night clerk, Mr. Glover—ow—”
“Night clerk? Very well, Solomon,” muttered Glover, grimly, “take this young lady to the warmest room in the house at once.”
“Every room’s full, Mr. Glover. Trains were all tied up last night.”
“Then show her to my room.”
“Your room’s occupied.”
“My room occupied, you villain? What do you mean? Throw out whoever’s in it instantly.”
“Mr. Brock is in your room.”
Gertrude had come over to the stove.
“Mr. Brock!”
“My father!”
“Yes, sir; yes, ma’am.”
Gertrude and Glover looked at one another.
“Mr. Blood brought him up last night,” said Solomon.
“Where’s Mr. Blood?”
“He hasn’t come up from the Wickiup. They said he was worried over a special from the Cat that was caught in the blizzard. Your laundry came in all right last night, Mr. Glover—”
“Hang the laundry.”
“I paid for it.”
“Will you cease your gabble? If Mr. Blood’s room is empty take Miss Block up there and rouse a chambermaid instantly to attend her. Do you hear?”
“Shall I throw out Mr. Brock?”
“Let him alone, stupid. What’s the matter with the lights?”
“The wires are down.”
“Get a candle for Miss Brock. Now, will you make haste?” Solomon, when he heard the name, stared at Miss Brock—but when he recognized her he started without argument and was gone an unconscionably long time.
They sat down where they could feast on each other’s eyes in the glow of the coal-stove.
“You have looked so worried all night,” said Gertrude, in love’s solicitude; “were you afraid we should be lost?”
“No, I didn’t intend we should be lost.”
“What was it? What is it that makes you so careworn?”
“Nothing special.”
“But you mustn’t have any secrets from me now. What is it?”
“Do you want to know?”
“Yes.”
“I couldn’t find time to get shaved before we left Sleepy Cat—”
She rose with both hands uplifted: “Shades of vain heroes! Have I wasted my sympathy all night on a man who has been saving my life with perfect calmness and worrying because he couldn’t get shaved?”
“Can you dispassionately say that I don’t need barbering?”
“No. But this is what I will say, silly fellow—you don’t know much about a woman’s heart, do you, Ab? When I first looked at you I thought you were the homeliest man I had ever seen, do you know that?”
Glover fingered his offending chin and looked at her somewhat pathetically.
“But last night”—her quick mouth was so eloquent—“last night I watched you. I saw your face lighted by the anger of the storm. I knew then what those heavy, homely lines below your eyes were for—strength. And I saw your eyes, to me so dull at first, wake and fill with such a light and burn so steadily hour after hour that I knew I had never seen eyes like yours. I knew you would save me—that is what made me so brave, goosie. Sit right where you are, please.”
She slipped out of her chair; he pursued. “If you will say such things and then run into the dark corners,” he muttered. But when Solomon appeared with a water-pitcher they were ready for him.
“Now what has kept you all this time?” glared Glover, insincerely.
“I couldn’t find any ice-water.”
“Ice-water!”
“Every pipe is froze solid, but I chopped up some ice and brought that.”
“Ice-water, you double-dyed idiot! Go get your candle.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Don’t be so cross,” whispered Gertrude. “You were so short with that poor fireman to-night, and he told me such a pitiful story about being ordered out and having to go or lose his position—”
“Did Foley tell you that?”
“Yes.”
“Surely, nerve runs in his family as well as his cousin’s. The rascal came because I hung up a little purse for a fireman at the roundhouse, and he nearly had a fight with another fellow that wanted to cut him out of the job.”
“Such a cheat! How much did you offer him?”
“Not very much.”
“But how much?”
“Twenty-five dollars, and, by heavens, he dunned me for it just after we started.”
“But his poor wife hung t
o his neck when he left—”
“No doubt. She has pulled all the hair out of his head twice that I know of—”
“And I gave him my purse with all the money I had in it.”
“How much?”
“About three hundred dollars.”
“Three hundred dollars! Foley will lay off two months and take the whole family back to Pittsburg. Now, here’s your candle and chopped ice and Mr. Battershawl.”
Gertrude turned for a last whisper—“What should you say if papa came down?”
“What should I say? He would probably say, ‘Mr. Glover, I have your room.’ ‘Don’t mention it,’ I should reply, ‘I have your daughter.’” But Mr. Brock did not come down.
Barely half an hour later, while Glover waited with anxiety at the foot of the stairs, Gertrude reappeared, and with her loveliness all new, walked shyly and haltingly down each step toward him.
Not a soul about the hotel office had stirred, and Glover led her to the retired little parlor, which was warm and dim, to reassure himself that the fluttering girl was all his own. Unable to credit the fulness of their own happiness they sat confiding to each other all the sweet trifles, now made doubly sweet, of their strange acquaintance. Before six o’clock, and while their seclusion was still their own, a hot breakfast was served to them where they sat, and day broke on storm without and lovers within.
CHAPTER XIX
SUSPENSE
What shapes the legends of the Wickiup? Is it because in the winter night the wind never sleeps in the gorge above the headquarters shack that despatchers talk yet of a wind that froze the wolf and the sheep and the herder to marble together? Is it because McGraw runs no more that switchmen tell of the run he made over Sweetgrass the night he sent a plough through eight hundred head of sheep in less than a tenth as many seconds? Could the night that laid the horse and the hunter side by side in the Spider Park drift have been wildest of all wild mountain nights? Or is it because Gertrude Brock and her railroad lover rode out its storm together that mountain men say there was never a storm like that? What shapes the Wickiup legends?
For three days Medicine Bend did not see the sun. Veering uneasily, springing from every quarter at once, the wind wedged the gray clouds up the mountain sides only to roll them like avalanches down the ragged passes. At the end of the week snow was falling.
Not until the morning of the third day when reports came in of the unheard-of temperatures in the North and West did the weather cause real apprehension. The division never had been in such a position to protect its winter traffic—for a year Callahan, Blood, and Glover had been overhauling and assembling the old and the new bucking equipment. But the wind settled at last in the northeast, and when it stilled the mercury sunk, and when it rose the snow fell, roofing the sheds on the passes, levelling the lower gulches, and piling up reserves along the cuts.
The first trouble came on the main line in the Heart Mountains, and Morris Blood, with the roadmaster of the sixth district and Benedict Morgan, got after it with a crew together.
Between the C bridge and Potter’s Gap they spent two days with a rotary and a flanger and three consolidated engines and went home, leaving everything swept clean, only to learn in the morning that west of the gap there were four feet of fresh snow clear to Rozelle. From the northern ranges came unusual reports of the continued severity of the storms. It was hardly a series of storms, for that winter the first storm that crossed the line lasted three weeks.
In the interval Bucks was holding to the directors at Medicine Bend, waiting for the weather to settle enough to send them to the coast. The Pittsburg party waited at Glen Tarn for Mr. Brock’s word to join him. At the Bend, Gertrude made love to her father, forfending the awful moment of disclosure that must come, and the cause of her hidden happiness and trouble strenuously made love to her.
To the joy of the conspirators, Bucks held Glover closely at headquarters, keeping him closeted for long periods on the estimates that were in final cooking for the directors; and so dense are great people and so keen the simple, that Gertrude held her lone seat of honor beside her father, at the table of the great financiers in the dining-room, without the remotest suspicion on their parts that the superb woman meeting them three times a day was carrying on a proudly-hidden love affair with the muscular, absorbed-looking man who sat alone across the aisle.
But the asthmatic old pastry cook, who weighed at least two hundred and thirty pounds and had not even seen the inside of the dining-room for three years, was thoroughly posted on every observable phase of the affair down to the dessert orders; and no one acquainted with the frank profanity of a mountain meat cook will doubt that the best of everything went hot from the range to Glover and Gertrude. Dollar tips and five-dollar tips from Eastern epicures could not change this, for the meals were served by waitresses who felt a personal responsibility in the issue of the pretty affair of the heart.
The whole second floor of the little hotel had been reserved for the directors’ party, and among the rooms was the parlor. There Glover called regularly every evening on Mr. Brock, who, somewhat at a loss to understand the young man’s interest, excused himself after the first few minutes and left Gertrude to entertain the gentleman who had been so kind to everybody that she could not be discourteous even if he was somewhat tedious.
One night after a particularly happy evening near the piano for Gertrude and Glover, Mr. Brock, re-entering the parlor, found the somewhat tedious gentleman bending very low, as his daughter said good-night, over her hand; in fact, the gentleman that had been so kind to everybody was kissing it.
When Glover recovered his perpendicular the cold magnate of the West End stood between the folding doors looking directly at him. If the owner of several trunk lines expected his look to inspire consternation he was disappointed. Each of the lovers feared but one person in the world; that was the other. Gertrude, with perhaps an extra touch of dignity, put her compromised hand to her belt for her handkerchief. Glover finished the sentence he was in the middle of—“If I am not ordered out. Good-night.”
But when Mr. Brock had turned abruptly on his heel and disappeared between the portières they certainly did look at one another.
“Have I got you into trouble now?” murmured Glover, penitently. Uneasiness was apparent in her expression, but with her back to the piano Gertrude stood steadfast.
“Not,” she said, with serious tenderness, “just now. Don’t you know? It was the first, the very first, day you looked into my eyes, dear, that you got me into trouble.”
Her pathetic sweetness moved him. Then he flamed with determination. He would take the burden on himself—would face her father at once, but she hushed him in real alarm and said, that battle she must fight unaided; it was after all only a little one, she whispered, after the one she had fought with herself. But he knew she glossed over her anxiety, for when he withdrew her eyes looked tears though they shed none.
In the morning there were two vacancies at the breakfast table; neither Gertrude nor her father appeared. When Glover returned to the hotel at five o’clock the first person he saw was Mrs. Whitney. She and Marie, with the doctor and Allen Harrison, had arrived on the first train out of the Springs in four days, and Mrs. Whitney’s greeting of Glover in the office was disconcerting. It scarcely needed Gertrude’s face at dinner, as she tried to brave the storm that had set in, or her reluctant admission when she saw him as she passed up to her room that she and her father had been up nearly the whole of the night before, to complete his depression.
Every effort he made during the evening to speak to Gertrude was balked by some untoward circumstance, but about nine o’clock they met on the parlor floor and Glover led her to the elevator, which was being run that night by Solomon Battershawl. Solomon lifted them to the top floor and made busy at the end of the hall while they had five short minutes. When they descend
ed he knew what she was facing. Even Marie, the one friend he thought he had in the family, had taken a stand against them, and her father was deaf to every appeal.
They parted, depressed, with only a hand pressure, a look and a whisper of constancy. At midnight, as Glover lay thinking, a crew caller rapped at his door. He brought a message and held his electric pocket-lamp near, while Glover, without getting up, read the telegram. It was from Bucks asking if he could take a rotary at once into the Heart Mountains.
Glover knew snow had been falling steadily on the main line for two days. East of the middle range it was nothing but extreme cold, west it had been one long storm. Morris Blood was at Goose River. The message was not an order; but on the division there was no one else available at the moment that could handle safely such a battery of engines as would be needed to bore the drifts west of the sheds. Moreover, Glover knew how Bucks had chafed under the conditions that kept the directors on his hands. They were impatient to get to the coast, and the general manager was anxious to be rid of them as soon as there should be some certainty of getting them safely over the mountains.
Glover, on the back of the telegram, scrawled a note to Crosby, the master-mechanic, and turned over not to sleep, but to think—and to think, not of the work before him, but of her and of her situation. A roundhouse caller roused him at half-past three with word that the snow battery was marked up for four o’clock. He rose, dressed deliberately and carefully for the exposure ahead, and sat down before a candle to tell Gertrude, in a note, when he hoped to be back.
Locking his trunk when he had done, he snuffed out the candle and closed his room door behind him. The hall was dark, but he knew its turns, and the carpeted stairs gave no sound as he walked down. At the second floor there were two stairways by which he could descend. He looked up the dim corridor toward where she slept. Somehow he could not make up his mind to leave without passing her room.
His heavy tread was noiseless, and at her door he paused and put his hand uncertainly upon the casing. In the darkness his head bent an instant on his outstretched arm—it had never before been hard to go; then he turned and walked softly away.
