rtyred? I shall be
afraid ever to ask you to do anything again. Was I wrong in--assuming
it would give you as well as all of us pleasure to dine together this
evening?"

"No. You know better than that. I am insanely presumptuous, I know
it. Let me ask one last favor----"

The gavotte rippled under her fingers. "No."

He turned away. She swung on the stool toward him and looked very
kindly and frankly up. "You have been too courteous to all of us for
that. Ask as many favors as you like, Mr. Glover," she murmured, "but
not, if you please, a last one."

"It shall be the last, Miss Brock. I only----"

"You only what?"

"Will you let me know what day you are going, so I may say good-by?"

"Certainly I will. You will be at Medicine Bend in any case, won't
you?"

"No. I have fifteen hundred miles to cover next week."

"What for--oh, it isn't any of my business, is it?"

"Looking over the snowsheds. Will you telegraph me?"

"Where?"

"At the Wickiup; it will reach me."

"You might have to come too far. We shall start in a few days."

"Will you telegraph me?"

"If you wish me to."

Eight days later, when suspense had grown sullen and Glover had parted
with all hope of hearing from her, he heard. In the depths of the
Heart River range her message reached him.

Every day Giddings, hundreds of miles away at the Wickiup, had had his
route-list. Giddings, who would have died for the engineer, waited,
every point in the repeating covered, day after day for a Glen Tarn
message that Glover expected. For four days Glover had hung like a dog
around the nearer stretches of the division. But the season was
advanced, he dared not delegate the last vital inspection of the year,
and bitterly he retreated from shed to shed until he was buried in the
barren wastes of the eighth district.

The day in the Heart River mountains is the thin, gray day of the
alkali and the sage. On Friday afternoon Glover's car lay sidetracked
at the east end of the Nine Mile shed waiting for a limited train to
pass. The train was late and the sun was dropping into an ashen strip
of wind clouds that hung cold as shrouds to the north and west when the
gray-powdered engine whistled for the siding.

Motionless beside the switch Glover saw down the gloom of the shed the
shoes wringing fire from the Pullman wheels, and wondered why they were
stopping. The conductor from the open vestibule waved to him as the
train slowed a