“He is innocent; as innocent as some hundreds of other narrow-minded, short-sighted old men whom chance, or the duplicity of the real rascals, puts at the head of corporations.”

“Yet you would make him suffer with the guilty.”

“Not willingly, you may be sure.  Not at all, if he would listen to reason.  But he won’t.  He’ll stand by North till the last gun is fired; and while North stays, there’ll be graft, big or little, as the opportunities warrant.”

Alicia held her peace while the caravan was measuring another half-mile of the boulder-strewn road.  Then she said:  “I feel so wretchedly inadequate to help you, Mr. Ford.  I wish you could wait until you have talked it over with brother.”

“So do I. But I am afraid postponement doesn’t lie with me, now.  From your uncle’s manner and from what he said to me yesterday, I can’t help feeling that the crisis is right here.  For two days Mr. Colbrith has been very plainly leading up to some sort of dramatic climax.  I can’t remotely guess what it is going to be; though I can guess that the plot isn’t his.”

Again she took time to consider, and when she spoke they were nearing the scene of strenuous activities at the moving track-end.

“You don’t think you could postpone it?” she asked, almost wistfully, he thought.  “I think—­I hope—­my brother will become interested again.  It is your fault that he lost interest, Mr. Ford.”

“My fault?” reproachfully.

“Certainly.  You didn’t give him enough to do.  He was happy and contented while you kept him hard at work.  But after the bonds were placed and the money raised—­”

“I’m a miserable sinner!” Ford confessed.  “And I had promised you, too!  But the battle has been so fierce at this end of the line; and I couldn’t be in two places at one time.  Your brother should have been made first vice-president, instead of North.  Perhaps we can bring it about yet—­if you don’t call it all off.”

“There it is again,” she retorted.  “You are dragging me in—­and trying to bribe me, too!”

“God forbid!” he said, so earnestly that she forgave him.  And then:  “I wish your brother were here—­now.”

“So do I,” she admitted.  Then she told him of the wire summons sent from Denver, and of the shadowy hope she had based upon it.

“Where was your brother then?” he asked.

“I don’t know, positively.  I hope he was in New York.  He was to come over in the Campania, in time for the shooting at Mount Ptarmigan.”

“You’ve had no word from him?”

“None.”

They were up with the track-layers, now, in a country of huge bare hills and high-lying, waterless valleys; and the president had halted the caravan to give his guests a chance to see a modern railroad in the actual throes of evolution.