PACIFIC SOUTHWESTERN RAILWAY CO.

     Office of the President.

     NEW YORK, August 24.

     To All Officials and Employees: 

At a called meeting of the stock-holders of this company, held in New York, August 23, Mr. John C. North was elected First Vice-President and General Manager of all lines of this company, operative and under construction.  All officers and employees will govern themselves accordingly.

     By Order of the Executive Committee.

     Approved: 

     SIDNEY J. COLBRITH, President.

XV

AN UNWILLING HOST

Standing in the Pacific portal of Plug Pass, on the old snow-crust which, even in midsummer, never entirely disappears at altitude ten thousand feet, they could look away westward over a billowing sea of mountain and mesa and valley breaking in far-distant, crystalline space against the mighty rampart of the Wasatch range, two hundred and other miles nearer the sunset.

It was an outlook both inspiring and chastening; with the scenic grandeurs to give the exalted uplift, and the still, gray-green face of the vast mountainous desert to shrink the beholder to microscopic littleness in the face of its stupendous heights and depths, its immeasurable bulks and interspaces.  Miss Alicia said something like this to Ford, in broken exclamations, when she had taken her first quailing eye-plunge from the lofty view-point.

“Yes; quite so,” Ford acquiesced, in the unresponsive tone of one who says what he must, rather than what he would like to say.  “It is all the things you have been saying, and more—­when one has the time and the mind to be enthusiastic about it.”

Miss Adair stood up very straight, and her chin was a protest in Praxitelean harmonies.  She knew very well how reluctantly her companion was doing the honors of the mountain vastnesses; how full of wrath he was because President Colbrith had seen fit to precipitate the Nadia and a private-car party into the midst of the strenuous building battle on the western extension.  But she argued that this was no reason why he should be crustily impossible with her.  Wherefore she said, merely to see him boil over: 

“I should think you would come up here often for this glorious view, Mr. Ford.  You do, don’t you?”

“Come up here for the view?  Oh, yes; I presume I have climbed up here a hundred times, first and last, and always for the sake of the view.  I began it the first winter I spent in Saint’s Rest, when the snow-shoeing was at its best.  Really to appreciate the scenery, you should take three hours for the approach from the basin down yonder, dragging a pair of Canadian raquettes by the toe-straps.”

The young woman laughed inwardly at the broadsword slash of his sarcasm.  It was so like the man; big and vigorous and energetic, and quite without regard for consequences or for the insignificance of the thing to be obliterated.  But she would not spare him.