Ford shook his head, and Frisbie lifted his hat to Miss Adair and turned to climb to his engine cab.  But at the moment of brake-releasings Ford halted him.

“One minute,” he said; and turning to his charge:  “I’ll borrow Dick’s engine and take you down to the Nadia’s siding, if you’d rather ride than walk.”

“Oh, will you?  That would be fine!  But oughtn’t Mr. Frisbie to get back to his work?”

“Y-yes,” Ford admitted.  “Time is rather important, just now.”

“Then we’ll walk,” she said with great decision.

“That’s all, Dick,” Ford called.  “Keep an eye open for Garcia.  He might make a fluke and shoot straight, for once in a way.”

They stood in silence on the wind-swept summit until the curving down-rush of the western grade had swallowed the retreating engine.  Miss Alicia was the first to speak when the iron clamor was distance-drowned.

“I like your Mr. Frisbie,” she said reflectively.  “Isn’t he the kind of man who would have taken the message to the other Garcia?”

“He is the kind of man who would stop a bullet for his friend, and think nothing of it—­if the bullet should happen to leave him anything to think with,” he returned warmly.  And then he added, half absently:  “He saved my life four years ago last summer.”

There was genuine human interest in her voice when she said gently: 

“Would you mind telling me about it?”

“It was up in the Minnesota pineries, where we were building a branch railroad through the corner of an Indian reservation.  A half-breed pot-hunter for the game companies had a right-of-way quarrel with the railroad people, and he pitched upon me as the proper person to kill.  It was a knife rush in the moonlight; and Dick might have shot him, only he was too tender-hearted.  So he got between us.”

“Well?” she prompted, when it became evident that Ford thought he had finished.

“That was all; except that it was touch and go with poor Dick for the next six weeks, with no surgeon worthy of the name nearer than St. Paul.”

Miss Alicia was more deeply impressed by the little story than she cared to have her companion suspect.  Her world was a world of the commonplace conventions, with New York as its starting point and homing place; and she thought she knew something of humankind.  But it came to her suddenly that the men she knew best were not at all like these two.

“Shall we go back now?” she asked; and they were half-way down to the siding and the private car before she spoke again.  It took some little time to compass sufficient humility to make amends, and even then the admission came to no more than four words.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Ford.”

“What for?” he asked, knowing only that he was coming to love her more blindly with every added minute of their companionship.

“For—­for trying to be hateful.”  It was a humbler thing than any she had ever said to a man, but the raw sincerity of time and place and association was beginning to get into her blood.