mber involved, and six dead," said the superintendent
soberly; then the four of them walked slowly and in silence up the track
toward the two camp-fires, where the unhurt survivors and the
service-car's guests were fighting the chill of the high-mountain
midnight.

XIX

THE CHALLENGE

Lidgerwood was unpleasantly surprised to find that the president's
daughter knew the man whom her father had tersely characterized as "a
born gentleman and a born buccaneer," but the fact remained. When he
came with Flemister into the circle of light cast by the smaller of the
two fires, Miss Brewster not only welcomed the mine-owner; she
immediately introduced him to her friends, and made room for him on the
flat stone which served her for a seat.

Lidgerwood sat on a tie-end a little apart, morosely observant. It is
the curse of the self-conscious soul to find itself often at the
meeting-point of comparisons. The superintendent knew Flemister a
little, as he had admitted to the president; and he also knew that some
of his evil qualities were of the sort which appeal, by the law of
opposites, to the normal woman, the woman who would condemn evil in the
abstract, perhaps, only to be irresistibly drawn by some of its purely
masculine manifestations. The cynical assertion that the worst of men
can win the love of the best of women is something both more and less
than a mere contradiction of terms; and since Eleanor Brewster's manly
ideal was apparently builded upon physical courage as its pedestal,
Flemister, in his dare-devil character, was quite likely to be the man
to embody it.

But just now the "gentleman buccaneer" was not living up to the full
measure of his reputation in the dare-devil field, as Lidgerwood was not
slow to observe. His replies to Miss Brewster and the others were not
always coherent, and his face, seen in the flickering firelight, was
almost ghastly. True, the talk was low-toned and fragmentary; desultory
enough to require little of any member of the group sitting around the
smouldering fire on the spur embankment. Death, in any form, insists
upon its rights, of silence and of respect, and the six motionless
figures lying under the spread Pullman-car sheets on the other side of
the spur track were not to be ignored.

Yet Lidgerwood fancied that of the group circling the fire, Flemister
was the one whose eyes turned oftenest toward the sheeted figures across
the track; sometimes in morbid starings, but