He stopped abruptly, and faced the station.  All at once there swept upon him a realization of how blind he had been, and what a fool he had almost made of himself.  Blackton was one of the contractors who were working miracles in the mountains.  He was a friend who would fight for him if necessary.  Mrs. Blackton, who preferred to be on the firing line with her husband than in her luxurious city home, was the leader of all that was decent and womanly in Tete Jaune.  Why not have these friends meet them at the train and take Joanne direct to their house?  Such recognition and friendship would mean everything to Joanne.  To take her to his cabin would mean——­

Inwardly he swore at himself as he hurried back to the station, and his face burned hotly as he thought of the chance such a blunder on his part would have given Quade and Culver Rann to circulate the stories with which they largely played their scoundrelly game.  He sent another and longer telegram.  This time it was to Blackton.

He ate dinner with Stevens, who had his new outfit ready for the mountains.  It was two o’clock before he brought Joanne up to the station.  She was dressed now as he had first seen her when she entered Quade’s place.  A veil covered her face.  Through the gray film of it he caught the soft warm glow of her eyes and the shimmer of gold-brown tendrils of her hair.  And he knew why she wore that veil.  It set his heart beating swiftly—­the fact that she was trying to hide from all eyes but his own a beauty so pure and wonderful that it made her uncomfortable when under the staring gaze of the Horde.

The hand that rested on his arm he pressed closer to his side as they walked up the station platform, and under his breath he laughed softly and joyously as he felt the thrill of it.  He spoke no word.  Not until they were in their seat in the coach did Joanne look at him after that pressure of her hand, and then she did not speak.  But in the veiled glow of her eyes there was something that told him she understood—­a light that was wonderfully gentle and sweet.  And yet, without words, she asked him to keep within his soul the things that were pounding madly there for speech.

As the train rolled on and the babble of voices about them joined the crunching rumble of the wheels, he wanted to lean close to her and tell her how a few hours had changed the world for him.  And then, for a moment, her eyes turned to him again, and he knew that it would be a sacrilege to give voice to the things he wanted to say.  For many minutes he was silent, gazing with her upon the wild panorama of mountain beauty as it drifted past the car window.  A loud voice two seats ahead of them proclaimed that they were about to make Templeton’s Curve.  The man was talking to his companion.

“They shot up a hundred thousand pounds of black powder an’ dynamite to make way for two hundred feet of steel on that curve,” he explained in a voice heard all over the car.  “They say you could hear the explosion fifty miles away.  Jack Templeton was near-sighted, an’ he didn’t see a rock coming down on him that was half as big as a house.  I helped scrape up what was left of ‘im an’ we planted him at this end of the curve.  It’s been Templeton’s Curve ever since.  You’ll see his grave—­with a slab over it!”