“If it comes to that, there were two of us,” he rejoined, matching her frankness.  “And, as you remarked a while back, I was certainly the aggressor.  Shall we call it a truce for the present?”

“If you will be generous enough.”

“Oh, I am generosity itself, under ordinary conditions; but just now I’ll admit that I am fearfully and wonderfully inhospitable.  I can’t help wishing most fervently that something had happened to prevent your uncle’s coming.”

“Is it uncle who is in the way?—­or the pleasure party?”

“Both.”

“We are negligible,” she said, meaning the pleasurers.

“No, you are not; and neither is your Uncle Sidney.”

“Is he still formidable to you?” she laughed.

“He is, indeed.  But, worse than that, he is likely to prove a very considerable disturbing element if I can’t keep him from plunging in upon us.”

She let half of the remaining distance to the end of the steep grade go underfoot before she said:  “I like to help people, sometimes; but I don’t like to do it in the dark.”

He would have explained instantly to a man for the sake of gaining an ally.  But he could not bring himself to the point of telling her the story of graft and misrule in which the MacMorroghs were the principals, and North—­and her uncle, by implication—­the backers.

So he said:  “It is rather a long story, and you would scarcely understand it.  We have been having constant trouble with the MacMorroghs, the contractors, and there is a bad state of affairs in the grading camps.  It has come to a point where I shall have to fight the MacMorroghs to some sort of a finish, and—­well, to put it very baldly, I don’t want to have to fight the MacMorroghs and the president in the same round.”

“Why should Uncle Sidney take the part of these men, if they are bad men, Mr. Ford?”

“Because he has always distrusted my judgment, and because he is loyal to Mr. North, whom he has made my superior.  Mr. North tells him that I am to blame.”

“But it must be a very dreadful condition of things, if what Mr. Frisbie said is all true.”

“Frisbie spoke of only one little incident.  Trouble like this we’re having to-day is constantly arising.  No money-making graft is too petty or too immoral for the MacMorroghs to connive at.  They rob and starve their laborers, and cheat the company with bad work.  I’ve got to have a free hand in dealing with them, or—­”

He stopped abruptly, realizing that he was talking to her as he might have talked to a specialist in his own profession.  Hence he was not disappointed when she said: 

“You go too fast for me.  But I think I understand now why our coming is inopportune.  And it’s comforting to know that the reason is a business reason.”

He put shame to the wall and blurted out suddenly:  “It is only one of the reasons, Miss Adair.  The—­the camps are no fit place for a party with women.  You—­you’ll have to be blind and deaf if your uncle persists in taking you with him.”