There was a small Pintsch globe in the hollow of the “umbrella roof,” with its single burner turned down to a mere pea of light.  Lidgerwood’s answer was to reach up and flood the platform with a sudden glow of artificial radiance.  The chorus of protest was immediate and reproachful.

“Oh, Mr. Lidgerwood! don’t spoil the perfect moonlight that way!” cried Miss Doty, and the others echoed the beseeching.

“You’ll get used to it in a minute,” asserted Lidgerwood, in good-natured sarcasm.  “It is so dark here in the canyon that I’m afraid some of you might fall overboard or get hit by the rocks, or something.”

“The idea!” scoffed Miss Carolyn.  Then, petulantly, to Van Lew:  “We may as well go in.  There is nothing more to be seen out here.”

Lidgerwood looked to Eleanor for his cue, or at least for a whiff of moral support.  But she turned traitor.

“You can do the meanest things in the name of solicitude, Howard,” she began; but before she could finish he had reached up and turned the gas off with a snap, saying, “All right; anything to please the children.”  After which, however, he spoke authoritatively to Van Lew and Jefferis.  “Don’t let your responsibilities lean out over the railing, you two.  There are places below here where the rocks barely give a train room to pass.”

“I’m not leaning out,” said Miss Brewster, as if she resented his care-taking.  Then, for his ear alone:  “But I shall if I want to.”

“Not while I am here to prevent you.”

“But you couldn’t prevent me, you know.”

“Yes, I could.”

“How?”

The special was rushing through the darkest of the high-walled clefts in the lower part of the canyon.  “This way,” he said, his love suddenly breaking bounds, and he took her in his arms.

She freed herself quickly, breathless and indignantly reproachful.

“I am ashamed for you!” she panted.  And then, with carefully calculated malice:  “What if Herbert had been looking?”

“I shouldn’t care if all the world had been looking,” was the stubborn rejoinder.  Then, passionately:  “Tell me one thing before we go any farther, Eleanor:  have you given him the right to call me out?”

“How can you doubt it?” she said; but now she was laughing at him again.

There was safety only in flight, and he fled; back to his desk and the work thereon.  He was wading dismally through a thick mass of correspondence, relating to a cattleman’s claim for stock killed, and thinking of nothing so little as the type-written words, when the roar of the echoing canyon walls died away, and the train came to a stand at Timanyoni, the first telegraph station in the shut-in valley between the mountain ranges.  A minute or two later the wheels began to revolve again, and Bradford came in.

“More maverick railroading,” he said disgustedly.  “Timanyoni had his red light out, and when I asked for orders he said he hadn’t any—­thought maybe we’d want to ask for ’em ourselves, being as we was running wild.”