“Yet it is a new empire in the rough,” he rejoined, with a touch of the old enthusiasm, “waiting only for the coming of this”—­putting his foot again upon the steel of the new railroad line.  “What you are looking at has been called a part of the Great American Desert—­the most forbidding part, in the stories of the early explorers.  Notwithstanding, there will come a time when you can focus your glass here on this mountain and look out over what the promoters will then be advertising as a ’peopled paradise,’ and these ’logs of wood in a row, with two strands of iron to fasten them together’ will bring it to pass.”

There was a flash of the enthusiast’s fire in the cool gray eyes to go with the words, and Miss Adair wondered at it.  He had stood for her as an embodiment of things practical and prosaic; as one too keenly watchful and alert on the purely industrial side to be in any sense a dreamer of dreams.  Some part of her thought slipped into speech.

“No, I am not an enthusiast,” he denied, in reply to her charge.  “At bottom, I’m only an engineer, with an ambition to build railroads.  But I should have learned no more than half of my trade if I couldn’t tell where it would be profitable to build them.”

“Never mind:  you seem to have convinced Uncle Sidney and the directors finally,” she commented.

“No; your uncle and the directors are not empire builders—­meaning to be,” he objected.  “They are after the present visible dollar in a western outlet for the Pacific Southwestern.  If we reach Green Butte before our competitors can broaden their narrow gauge to that point, we shall have a practicable line from Chicago to the Pacific coast.”

“I understand,” she said.  “But yours is the higher ideal—­the true American ideal.”

“It’s business,” he asserted.

“Well, isn’t business the very heart and soul of the American ideal?” she laughed.

This time he laughed with her, forgetting his troubles for the moment.

“I guess it is, in the last analysis,” he said.  And then:  “I’m sorry to keep you waiting so long, if you are anxious to get back to the Nadia.  But I warned you beforehand.  I must keep my appointment with Frisbie.  Do you see anything of him?” This because she was again sweeping the western wilderness with the field-glass.

“What am I to look for?”

“The smoke of an engine.”

She focused the glass on the gorge at the foot of the pass.  “I see it!” she cried.  “A little black beetle of a thing just barely crawling.  Now it is turning into the first curve of the great loop.”

“Then we shan’t have very much longer to wait.  Do you find the ten-thousand-foot breeze chilly?  Turn up the collar of your coat and we’ll walk a bit.”

It was his first appreciable concern for her comfort, and she gave him full credit.  Coquetry was no part of Miss Alicia’s equipment, but no woman likes to be utterly neglected on the care-taking side, or to be transformed ruthlessly into a man-companion whose well-being may be brusquely ignored.  And this young athlete in brown duck shooting-coat and service leggings, who was patiently doing a sentry-go beside her up and down the newly-laid track at the summit of Plug Pass, was quite a different person from the abashed apologist who had paid for her dinner in the dining-car on the night of purse-snatchings.