XVI

THE TRUTHFUL ALTITUDES

A low, tremulous shudder was beginning to lift itself, like the distant growling of thunder, upon the tinnient air of the high summit.  A moment later a heavy construction engine shot around the final curve in the westward climb, with Michael Gallagher hanging out of the cab window on the engineer’s side.

The two at the summit faced about to watch the approach.  The big engine came lumbering and lurching dangerously over the unsurfaced track in a fierce spurt for the mountain-top, its stack vomiting fire, its cylinder-cocks hissing shrilly, and its exhaust ripping the spheral silences like the barking detonations of a machine-gun.

Ford glanced aside at his companion; her expressive face was a study in delighted animation and he decided that he had again misjudged the president’s niece.  She was beating time softly with her gloved hands and singing the song of the locomotive: 

“’With a michnai—­ghignai—­shtingal!  Yah!  Yah!  Yah! 
Ein—­zwei—­drei—­Mutter!  Yah!  Yah!  Yah! 
    She climb upon der shteeple,
    Und she frighten all der people,
Singin’ michnai—­ghignai—­shtingal!  Yah!  Yah!’”

she quoted; and Ford’s heart went out to her in new and comradely outreachings.

“You read Naught-naught-seven?” he said:  “you are one woman in a thousand.”

“Merci!” she countered.  “Small favors thankfully received.  Brother thinks there is only one person writing, nowadays, and the name of that person is Kipling.  I get a little of it by mere attrition.”

The brakes of the big engine were still gripping the wheels when a small man with wicked mustaches and goatee dropped from the gangway.  His khaki suit was weather-faded to a dirty green, and he was grimy and perspiring and altogether unpresentable; but he pulled himself together and tried to look pleasant when he saw that his chief had a companion, and that the companion was a lady.

“I’m sorry if I have kept you waiting,” he began.  “Gallagher was shifting steel for the track-layers when your wire found me, and the engine couldn’t be spared,”—­this, of course, to Ford.  Then, with an apologetic side glance for the lady:  “Riley’s in hot water again—­up to his chin.”

“What’s the matter now?” gritted Ford; and Alicia marked the instant change to masterful command.

“Same old score.  The Italians are kicking again at the MacMorrogh Brothers’ commissary—­because they have to pay two prices and get chuck that a self-respecting dog wouldn’t eat; and, besides, they say they are quarrying rock—­which is true—­and getting paid by the MacMorroghs for moving earth.  They struck at noon to-day.”

The chief frowned gloomily, and the president’s niece felt intuitively that her presence was a bar to free speech.

“It’s straight enough about the rotten commissary and the graft on the pay-rolls,” said Ford wrathfully.  “Is the trouble likely to spread to the camps farther down?”