“I’d like to believe you’re a winner, Ford; you deserve to be.  Come and see me—­and make your call upon Mr. North as brief as possible.  He’ll probe you if you don’t.”

This was how it came about that the next morning, when Ford went to call upon the sallow, heavy-faced, big-bodied man who sat behind the glass door lettered “General Manager, Private,”—­this after half an hour spent in Auditor Evans’ private office,—­it was only to ask for leave of absence to go East—­on business of a personal nature, he explained, when Mr. North was curious enough to ask his object.

III

LOSS AND DAMAGE

At this period of his existence, Stuart Ford troubled himself as little as any anchorite of the desert about the eternal feminine.

It was not that he was more or less than a man, or in any sense that anomalous and impossible thing called a woman-hater.  On the contrary, his attitude toward women in the mass was distinctly and at times boyishly sentimental.  But when a young man is honestly in love with his calling, and is fully convinced of its importance to himself and to a restlessly progressive world, single-heartedness becomes his watchword, and what sentiment there is in him will be apt to lie comfortably dormant.

For six full working-days Ford had been immersed to the eyes in the intricacies of his railway problem, acquiring in Chicago a valiseful of documentary data that demanded to be classified and thoroughly digested before he reached New York and the battle-field actual.  This was why he was able to ride all day in studious abstraction in his section of the Chicago-New York Pullman, without so much as a glance for the young woman in the modest gray traveling coat directly across the aisle.

She was well worth the glance, as he admitted willingly enough afterward.  She was the dainty type, with fluffy bright brown hair, eyes the color of wood violets, a nose tilted to the precise angle of bewitching piquancy, and the adorable mouth and chin familiarized to two continents by the artistic pen of the Apostle of the American Girl.  How he could have ridden within arm’s reach of her through all the daylight hours of a long summer day remained as one of Ford’s unanswered enigmas; but it required an accident and a most embarrassing contretemps to make him aware of her existence.

The accident was one of the absurd sort.  The call for dinner in the dining-car had been given, and Ford was just behind the young woman in the rear of the procession which filed forward out of the Pullman.  The train had at that moment left a way station, and the right-hand vestibule door was still open and swinging disjointedly across the narrow passage.  Ford reached an arm past the young woman to fold the two-leaved door out of her way.  As he did it, the door-knob hooked itself mischievously in the loop of her belt chatelaine, snatched it loose, and flung it out into the backward-rushing night.