t to his stronghold at the
other end of the Rosemary.

"Well!" said the flaxen-haired Bessie, catching her breath. But
Virginia laughed.

"I'm glad I'm not Mr. Winton," she said.

IV. THE CRYSTALLINE ALTITUDES

Morning in the highest highlands of the Rockies, a morning clear,
cold, and tense, with a bell-like quality in the frosty air to make
the cracking of a snow-laden spruce-bough resound like a pistol-shot.
For Denver and the dwellers on the eastern plain the sun is an hour
high; but the hamlet mining-camp of Argentine, with its dovecote
railway station and two-pronged siding, still lies in the steel-blue
depths of the canyon shadow.

Massive mountains, dark green to the timber line and dazzling white
above it, shut in the narrow valley to right and left. A mimic
torrent, ice-bound in the quieter pools, drums and gurgles on its
descent midway between two railway embankments, the one to which the
station and side-tracks belong, old and well-settled, the other new
and as yet unballasted. Just opposite the pygmy station a lateral
gorge intersects the main canyon, making a deep gash in the opposing
mountain bulwark, around which the new line has to find its way by a
looping detour.

In a scanty widening of the main canyon a few hundred yards below the
station a graders' camp of rude slab shelters is turning out its horde
of wild-looking Italians; and on a crooked spur track fronting the
shanties blue wood-smoke is curling lazily upward from the kitchen car
of a construction train.

All night long the Rosemary, drawn by the sturdiest of mountain-climbing
locomotives, had stormed onward and upward from the valley of the
Grand, through black defiles and around the shrugged shoulders of the
mighty peaks to find a resting-place in the white-robed dawn on the
siding at Argentine. The lightest of sleepers, Virginia had awakened
when the special was passing through Carbonate; and, drawing the berth
curtain, she had lain for an hour watching the solemn procession of
cliffs and peaks wheeling in stately and orderly array against the
inky background of sky. Now, in the steel-blue dawn, she was--or
thought she was--the first member of the party to dress and steal out
upon the railed platform to look abroad upon the wondrous scene in the
canyon.

But her reverie, trance-like in its wordless enthusiasm, was presently
broken by a voice behind her--the voice, namely, of Mr. Arthur
Jastrow.

"What a howling wildern