and around and about on the two divisions, and before leaving his
office in the Crow's Nest to go down to the waiting special, he had
thrust a bunch of letters and papers into his pocket to be ground
through the business-mill on the run to Little Butte.

It was his surreptitious transference of the rubber-banded bunch of
letters to the oblivion of the closed service-car desk, observed by Miss
Brewster, that gave the president's daughter an opportunity to make
partial amends for having turned his business trip into a car-party.
Before the special was well out of the Angels yard she was commanding
silence, and laying down the law for the others, particularizing Carolyn
Doty, though only by way of a transfixing eye.

"Listen a moment, all of you," she called. "We mustn't forget that this
isn't a planned excursion for us; it's a business trip for Mr.
Lidgerwood, and we are here by our own invitation. We must make
ourselves small, accordingly, and not bother him. _Savez vous?_"

Van Lew laughed, spread his long arms, and swept them all out toward the
rear platform. But Miss Eleanor escaped at the door and went back to
Lidgerwood.

"There, now!" she whispered, "don't ever say that I can't do the really
handsome thing when I try. Can you manage to work at all, with these
chatterers on the car?"

She was steadying herself against the swing of the car, with one shapely
hand on the edge of the desk, and he covered it with one of his own.

"Yes, I can work," he asserted. "The one thing impossible is not to love
you, Eleanor. It's hard enough when you are unkind; you mustn't make it
harder by being what you used always to be to me."

"What a lover you are when you forget to be self-conscious!" she said
softly; none the less she freed the imprisoned hand with a hasty little
jerk. Then she went on with playful austerity: "Now you are to do
exactly what you were meaning to do when you didn't know we were coming
with you. I'll make them all stay away from you just as long as I can."

She kept her promise so well that for an industrious hour Lidgerwood
scarcely realized that he was not alone. For the greater part of the
interval the sight-seers were out on the rear platform, listening to
Miss Brewster's stories of the Red Desert. When she had repeated all she
had ever heard, she began to invent; and she was in the midst of one of
the most blood-curdling of the inventions when Lidgerwood, having worked
through his bunch of papers