A small frown gathered between Ford’s eyes.  He was far enough from suspecting that this was the outworking of Kenneth’s “notion”; that Mr. Colbrith’s annual inspection tour over the Pacific Southwestern had been extended to cover the new line at Kenneth’s suggestion—­a suggestion arising out of purely reformatory motives.  Nor would it have helped matters much if he had known Kenneth’s genuine distress when it transpired that the suggestion bade fair to result in precipitating a private car-load of pleasurers into the pandemonium of the grading-camps.

But the pleasurers were as yet only upon the borders of the pandemonium, and Ford was torturing his ingenuity to devise some argument strong enough to turn back the threatened invasion.  There were reasons enough why a party with women among its members should not be projected into the grading and track-laying field.  It was no place for women, Ford was telling himself wrathfully; especially for the women of the president’s own household.

In the little interval of silence Miss Adair was focusing her field-glass and trying to trace the line of the descending grade into the headwater valley of the Pannikin.  Ford did not mean to be ungracious to her—­what lover ever means to be curt to the one woman in all the world?  But it is not easy to be angry in nine parts and loving-kind in the tenth—­anger being one of the inclusive emotions.  Nevertheless, he made the effort, for her sake.  However inconsiderate Mr. Colbrith was, she was blameless.

“Let me show you,” he said, taking the field-glass and adjusting it for her.  “Now hold it steadily and pick up the line in the great loop....  Have you found it?...  Now follow it slowly until you come to the point where it turns into the valley, and you can trace it for miles by the cuts and fills.”

She followed his directions until the line of the extension became a vanishing thread in the distance, and then was content to let the glass sweep the vastnesses beyond.  When she spoke it was of the topographic immensities.

“I heard you telling brother at the dinner-table in Chicago that you were able to see more in this wilderness than you have ever been able to make any one else see.  Can I see it with the glass?”

“Hardly,” he smiled.  “I was trying to tell your brother of the magnificent possibilities of the country lying between this and that farthest mountain range; the country we are going to open up.  It was a gospel I had been trying to preach to the directors, but none of them believed—­not even your uncle.”

“I see nothing but vastness and cold gray grandeurs,” she said, adding:  “and the very bigness of it makes me feel like a mere atom, or a molecule—­whichever is the smaller.”