“DOROTHY BROUGHTON.”

As promptly as the return mails could bring her a reply one came, although it was, of course, a matter of weeks.  During those weeks Dorothy had not only “read up” on the subject of South America with especial reference to Colombia; she had also posted herself, so far as a general reader may, concerning the rather comprehensive subject of mining engineering.  This knowledge helped her to an understanding of Waldron’s next letter.  He gave her a brief but graphic description of his surroundings in a camp upon the mountains, reached by a trail of nearly thirty miles from Puerto Andes.  Certain long-delayed and badly needed machinery had arrived at ten o’clock of the previous evening, packed over the trail by mules.  This had been unloaded by three in the morning, and the engineers had been so glad to see the stuff at last that they had been unwilling to go at once to bed, tired as they were.  The mail had come in by the same route, and it had been by the smouldering campfire of the early morning that Waldron had read his letter from Dorothy.  “Such a very short letter!” he said of it, and continued: 

“Yet it was more welcome than you can guess.  I had done a lot of speculating as to what it would look like when it came—­if it came—­and it looked not unlike what I had fancied.  I was sure you wouldn’t write one of those tall, angular hands, ten words to a page, which remind one of linked telegraph poles.  Neither would you be guilty of that commonplace little round script which school-children are taught now, and which goes on influencing their handwriting all their days.  There would be character in it, thought I—­and there was!

“It made me long for more—­that letter!  I wonder if you have the least idea what it feels like to be off in a country like this, your only real companion another engineer.  Splendid fellow, Hackett, and I couldn’t ask a better; and the work is great.  But there comes an hour now and then when there seems more beauty in one small letter postmarked “home” than in all the gorgeous sunsets of this wonderful country.

“May I write often and at length?  I can think of no happier way to spend the hour before we turn in than in writing to you.  And if you will answer my letters, as you have been so good as to do with my first one, I shall have the most compelling reason of my life to watch the mails.

“I want—­as I wanted when a schoolboy—­“to know you.”  I want you to know me.  There is no way in which this can be accomplished for a long time to come except by letters.  Won’t you agree to this regular interchange?  I don’t mean that which I presume you mean when you say it will be “interesting to hear from Colombia.”  You mean, I suppose, a letter now and then, at the intervals which conventionality imposes at the beginning of a correspondence, possibly shortening as time goes on, but taking at least half a year to get under way.  I want it to get under way at once!  We can receive mail but once a fortnight at the best up here, and there are often delays.  So if you answer my letters as soon as you get them I shall not hear from you too often.  Please!