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 descended 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.




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