Philip had stored up a string of questions as to the hunting of goat in the Rockies, and impatiently produced them.  Anderson replied, but, as Elizabeth immediately perceived, with a complete lack of his usual animation.  He spoke with effort, occasionally stumbling over his words.  She could not help looking at him curiously, and presently even Philip noticed something wrong.

“I say, Anderson!—­what have you been doing to yourself?  You look as though you had been knocking up.”

“I have been a bit driven this week,” said Anderson, with a start.  “Oh, nothing!  You must look at this piece of line.”

And as they ran down the long ravine from Field to Golden, beside a river which all the way seems to threaten the gliding train by the savage force of its descent, he played the showman.  The epic of the C.P.R.—­no one knew it better, and no one could recite it more vividly than he.

So also, as they left the Rockies behind; as they sped along the Columbia between the Rockies to their right and the Selkirks to their left; or as they turned away from the Columbia, and, on the flanks of the Selkirks, began to mount that forest valley which leads to Roger’s Pass, he talked freely and well, exerting himself to the utmost.  The hopes and despairs, the endurances and ambitions of the first explorers who ever broke into that fierce solitude, he could reproduce them; for, though himself of a younger generation, yet by sympathy he had lived them.  And if he had not been one of the builders of the line, in the incessant guardianship which preserves it from day to day, he had at one time played a prominent part, battling with Nature for it, summer and winter.

Delaine, at last, came out to listen.  Philip in the grip of his first hero-worship, lay silent and absorbed, watching the face and gestures of the speaker.  Elizabeth sat with her eyes turned away from Anderson towards the wild valley, as they rose and rose above it.  She listened; but her heart was full of new anxieties.  What had happened to him?  She felt him changed.  He was talking for their pleasure, by a strong effort of will; that she realised.  When could she get him alone?—­her friend!—­who was clearly in distress.

They approached the famous bridges on the long ascent.  Yerkes came running through the car to point out with pride the place where the Grand Duchess had fainted beneath the terrors of the line.  With only the railing of their little platform between them and the abyss, they ran over ravines hundreds of feet deep—­the valley, a thousand feet sheer, below.  And in that valley, not a sign of house, of path; only black impenetrable forest—­huge cedars and Douglas pines, filling up the bottoms, choking the river with their debris, climbing up the further sides, towards the gleaming line of peaks.

“It is a nightmare!” said Delaine involuntarily, looking round him.