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THE DAUGHTER OF A MAGNATE

by

FRANK H. SPEARMAN

Author of
  Whispering Smith,
  Doctor Bryson, Etc.







[Frontispiece: Gertrude used her glass constantly.]



Grosset & Dunlap
Publishers : : New York

Copyright, 1903, by
Charles Scribner's Sons

Published, October, 1903




To

WESLEY HAMILTON PECK, M.D.




CONTENTS


CHAP.

     I. A JUNE WATER
    II. AN ERROR AT HEADQUARTERS
   III. INTO THE MOUNTAINS
    IV. AS THE DESPATCHER SAW
     V. AN EMERGENCY CALL
    VI. THE CAT AND THE RAT
   VII. TIME BEING MONEY
  VIII. SPLITTING THE PAW
    IX. A TRUCE
     X. AND A SHOCK
    XI. IN THE LALLA ROOKH
   XII. A SLIP ON A SPECIAL
  XIII. BACK TO THE MOUNTAINS
   XIV. GLEN TARN
    XV. NOVEMBER
   XVI. NIGHT
  XVII. STORM
 XVIII. DAYBREAK
   XIX. SUSPENSE
    XX. DEEPENING WATERS
   XXI. PILOT
  XXII. THE SOUTH ARETE
 XXIII. BUSINESS




The Daughter of a Magnate


CHAPTER I

A JUNE WATER

The train, a special, made up of a private car and a diner, was running
on a slow order and crawled between the bluffs at a snail's pace.

Ahead, the sun was sinking into the foothills and wherever the eye
could reach to the horizon barren wastes lay riotously green under the
golden blaze.  The river, swollen everywhere out of its banks, spread
in a broad and placid flood of yellow over the bottoms, and a hundred
shallow lakes studded with willowed islands marked its wandering course
to the south and east.  The clear, far air of the mountains, the glory
of the gold on the June hills and the illimitable stretch of waters
below, spellbound the group on the observation platform.

"It's a pity, too," declared Conductor O'Brien, who was acting as
mountain Baedeker, "that we're held back this way when we're covering
the prettiest stretch on the road for running.  It is right along here
where you are riding that the speed records of the world have been
made.  Fourteen and six-tenths miles were done in nine and a half
minutes just west of that curve about six months ago--of course it was
down hill."

Several of the party were listening.  "Do you use speed recorders out
here?" asked Allen Harrison.

"How's that?"

"Do you use speed recorders?"

"Only on our slow trains," replied O'Brien.  "To put speed recorders on
Paddy McGraw or Jimmie the Wind would be like timing a teal duck with
an eight-day clock.  Sir?" he asked, turning to another questioner
while the laugh lingered on his side.  "No; those are not really
mountains at all.  Those are the foothills of the Sleepy Cat
range--west of the Spider Water.  We get into that range about two
hundred miles from here--well, I say they are west of the Spider, but
for ten days it's been hard to say exactly where the Spider is.  The
Spider is making us all the trouble with high water just now--and we're
coming out into the valley in about a minute," he added as the car gave
an embarrassing lurch.  "The track is certainly soft, but if you'll
stay right where you are, on this side, ladies, you'll get the view of
your lives when we leave the bluffs.  The valley is about nine miles
broad and it's pretty much all under water."

Beyond the curve they were taking lay a long tangent stretching like a
steel wand across a sea of yellow, and as their engine felt its way
very gingerly out upon it there rose from the slow-moving trucks of
their car the softened resonance that tells of a sounding-board of
waters.

Soon they were drawn among wooded knolls between which hurried little
rivers tossed out of the Spider flood into dry waterways and brawling
with surprised stones and foaming noisily at stubborn root and
impassive culvert.  Through the trees the travellers caught passing
glimpses of shaded eddies and a wilderness of placid pools.  "And
this," murmured Gertrude Brock to her sister Marie, "this is the
Spider!"  O'Brien, talking to the men at her elbow, overheard.
"Hardly, Miss Brock; not yet.  You haven't seen the river yet.  This is
only the backwater."

They were rising the grade to the bridge approach, and when they
emerged a few moments later from the woods the conductor said, "There!"

The panorama of the valley lay before them.  High above their level and
a mile away, the long thread-like spans of Hailey's great bridge
stretched from pier to pier.  To the right of the higher ground a fan
of sidetracks spread, with lines of flat cars and gondolas loaded with
stone, brush, piling and timbers, and in the foreground two hulking
pile-drivers, their leads, like rabbits' ears laid sleekly back,
squatted mysteriously.  Switch engines puffed impatiently up and down
the ladder track shifting stuff to the distant spurs.  At the river
front an army of men moved like loaded ants over the dikes.  Beyond
them the eye could mark the boiling yellow of the Spider, its winding
channel marked through the waste of waters by whirling driftwood,
bobbing wreckage and plunging trees--sweepings of a thousand angry
miles.  "There's the Spider," repeated the West End conductor,
pointing, "out there in the middle where you see things moving right
along.  That's the Spider, on a twenty-year rampage."  The train,
moving slowly, stopped.  "I guess we've got as close to it as we're
going to, for a while.  I'll take a look forward."

It was the time of the June water in the mountains.  A year earlier the
rise had taken the Peace River bridge and with the second heavy year of
snow railroad men looked for new trouble.  June is not a month for
despair, because the mountain men have never yet scheduled despair as a
West End liability.  But it is a month that puts wrinkles in the right
of way clear across the desert and sows gray hairs in the roadmasters'
records from McCloud to Bear Dance.  That June the mountain streams
roared, the foothills floated, the plains puffed into sponge, and in
the thick of it all the Spider Water took a man-slaughtering streak and
started over the Bad Lands across lots.  The big river forced Bucks'
hand once more, and to protect the main line Glover, third of the
mountain roadbuilders, was ordered off the high-line construction and
back to the hills where Brodie and Hailey slept, to watch the Spider.

The special halted on a tongue of high ground flanking the bridge and
extending upstream to where the river was gnawing at the long dike that
held it off the approach.  The delay was tedious.  Doctor Lanning and
Allen Harrison went forward to smoke.  Gertrude Brock took refuge in a
book and Mrs. Whitney, her aunt, annoyed her with stories.  Marie Brock
and Louise Donner placed their chairs where they could watch the
sorting and unloading of never-ending strings of flat cars, the
spasmodic activity in the lines of laborers, the hurrying of the
foremen and the movement of the rapidly shifting fringe of men on the
danger line at the dike.

The clouds which had opened for the dying splendor of the day closed
and a shower swept over the valley; the conductor came back in his
raincoat--his party were at dinner.  "_Are_ we to be detained much
longer?" asked Mrs. Whitney.

"For a little while, I'm afraid," replied the trainman diplomatically.
"I've been away over there on the dike to see if I could get permission
to cross, but I didn't succeed."

"Oh, conductor!" remonstrated Louise Donner.

"And we don't get to Medicine Bend to-night," said Doctor Lanning.

"What we need is a man of influence," suggested Harrison.  "We ought
never to have let your 'pa' go," he added, turning to Gertrude Brock,
beside whom he sat.

"Can't we really get ahead?"  Gertrude lifted her brows reproachfully
as she addressed the conductor.  "It's becoming very tiresome."

O'Brien shook his head.

"Why not see someone in authority?" she persisted.

"I have seen the man in authority, and nearly fell into the river doing
it; then he turned me down."

"Did you tell him who we were?" demanded Mrs. Whitney.

"I made all sorts of pleas."

"Does he know that Mr. Bucks _promised_ we should be In Medicine Bend
to-night?" asked pretty little Marie Brock.

"He wouldn't in the least mind that."

Mrs. Whitney bridled.  "Pray who is he?"

"The construction engineer of the mountain division is the man in
charge of the bridge just at present."

"It would be a very simple matter to get orders over his head,"
suggested Harrison.

"Not very."

"Mr. Bucks?"

"Hardly.  No orders would take us over that bridge to-night without
Glover's permission."

"What an autocrat!" sighed Mrs. Whitney.  "No matter; I don't care to
go over it, anyway."

"But I do," protested Gertrude.  "I don't feel like staying in this
water all night, if you please."

"I'm afraid that's what we'll have to do for a few hours.  I told Mr.
Glover he would be in trouble if I didn't get my people to Medicine
Bend to-night."

"Tell him again," laughed Doctor Lanning.

Conductor O'Brien looked embarrassed.  "You'd like to ask particular
leave of Mr. Glover for us, I know," suggested Miss Donner.

"Well, hardly--the second time--not of Mr. Glover."  A sheet of rain
drenched the plate-glass windows.  "But I'm going to watch things and
we'll get out just as soon as possible.  I know Mr. Glover pretty well.
He is all right, but he's been down here now a week without getting out
of his clothes and the river rising on him every hour.  They've got
every grain bag between Salt Lake and Chicago and they're filling them
with sand and dumping them in where the river is cutting."

"Any danger of the bridge going?" asked the doctor.

"None in the world, but there's a lot of danger that the river will go.
That would leave the bridge hanging over dry land.  The fight is to
hold the main channel where it belongs.  They're getting rock over the
bridge from across the river and strengthening the approach for fear
the dike should give way.  The track is busy every minute, so I
couldn't make much impression on Mr. Glover."

There was light talk of a deputation to the dike, followed by the
resignation of travellers, cards afterward, and ping-pong.  With the
deepening of the night the rain fell harder, and the wind rising in
gusts drove it against the glass.  When the women retired to their
compartments the train had been set over above the bridge where the
wind, now hard from the southeast, sung steadily around the car.

Gertrude Brock could not sleep.  After being long awake she turned on
the light and looked at her watch; it was one o'clock.  The wind made
her restless and the air in the stateroom had become oppressive.  She
dressed and opened her door.  The lights were very low and the car was
silent; all were asleep.

At the rear end she raised a window-shade.  The night was lighted by
strange waves of lightning, and thunder rumbled in the distance
unceasingly.  Where she sat she could see the sidings filled with cars,
and when a sharper flash lighted the backwater of the lakes, vague
outlines of far-off bluffs beetled into the sky.

She drew the shade, for the continuous lightning added to her disquiet.
As she did so the rain drove harshly against the car and she retreated
to the other side.  Feeling presently the coolness of the air she
walked to her stateroom for her Newmarket coat, and wrapping it about
her, sunk into a chair and closed her eyes.  She had hardly fallen
asleep when a crash of thunder split the night and woke her.  As it
rolled angrily away she quickly raised the window-curtain.

The heavens were frenzied.  She looked toward the river.  Electrical
flashes charging from end to end of the angry sky lighted the bridge,
reflected the black face of the river and paled flickering lights and
flaming torches where, on vanishing stretches of dike, an army of dim
figures, moving unceasingly, lent awe to the spectacle.

She could see smoke from the hurrying switch engines whirled viciously
up into the sweeping night and above her head the wind screamed.  A
gale from the southwest was hurling the Spider against the revetment
that held the eastern shore and the day and the night gangs together
were reinforcing it.  Where the dike gave under the terrific pounding,
or where swiftly boiling pools sucked under the heavy piling, Glover's
men were sinking fresh relays of mattresses and loading them with stone.

At moments laden flat cars were pushed to the brink of the flood, and
men with picks and bars rose spirit-like out of black shadows to
scramble up their sides and dump rubble on the sunken brush.  Other men
toiling in unending procession wheeled and slung sandbags upon the
revetment; others stirred crackling watchfires that leaped high into
the rain, and over all played the incessant lightning and the angry
thunder and the flying night.

She shut from her eyes the strangely moving sight, returned to her
compartment, closed her door and lay down.  It was quieter within the
little room and the fury of the storm was less appalling.

Half dreaming as she lay, mountains shrouded in a deathly lightning
loomed wavering before her, and one, most terrible of all, she strove
unwillingly to climb.  Up she struggled, clinging and slipping, a
cramping fear over all her senses, her ankles clutched in icy fetters,
until from above, an apparition, strange and threatening, pushed her,
screaming, and she swooned into an awful gulf.

"Gertrude!  Gertrude!  Wake up!" cried a frightened voice.

The car was rocking in the wind, and as Gertrude opened her door Louise
Donner stumbled terrified into her arms.  "Did you hear that awful,
awful crash?  I'm sure the car has been struck."

"No, no, Louise."

"It surely has been.  Oh, let us waken the men at once, Gertrude; we
shall be killed!"

The two clung to one another.  "I'm afraid to stay alone, Gertrude,"
sobbed her companion.

"Stay with me, Louise.  Come."  While they spoke the wind died and for
a moment the lightning ceased, but the calm, like the storm, was
terrifying.  As they stood breathless a report like the ripping of a
battery burst over their heads, a blast shook the heavy car and howled
shrilly away.

Sleep was out of the question.  Gertrude looked at her watch.  It was
four o'clock.  The two dressed and sat together till daylight.  When
morning broke, dark and gray, the storm had passed and out of the
leaden sky a drizzle of rain was falling.  Beside the car men were
moving.  The forward door was open and the conductor in his stormcoat
walked in.

"Everything is all right this morning, ladies," he smiled.

"All right?  I should think everything all wrong," exclaimed Louise.
"We have been frightened to death."

"They've got the cutting stopped," continued O'Brien, smiling.  "Mr.
Glover has left the dike.  He just told me the river had fallen six
inches since two o'clock.  We'll be out of here now as quick as we can
get an engine: they've been switching with ours.  There was
considerable wind in the night----"

"Considerable _wind_!"

"You didn't notice it, did you?  Glover loaded the bridge with freight
trains about twelve o'clock and I'm thinking it's lucky, for when the
wind went into the northeast about four o'clock I thought it would take
my head off.  It snapped like dynamite clear across the valley."

"Oh, we heard!"

"When the wind jumped, a crew was dumping stone into the river.  The
men were ordered off the flat cars but there were so many they didn't
all get the word at once, and while the foreman was chasing them down
he was blown clean into the river."

"Drowned?"

"No, he was not.  He crawled out away down by the bridge, though a man
couldn't have done it once in a thousand times.  It was old Bill
Dancing--he's got more lives than a cat.  Do you remember where we
first pulled up the train in the afternoon?  A string of ten box cars
stood there last night and when the wind shifted it blew the whole
bunch off the track."

"Oh, do let us get away from here," urged Gertrude.  "I feel as if
something worse would happen if we stayed.  I'm sorry we ever left
McCloud yesterday."

The men came from their compartments and there was more talk of the
storm.  Clem and his helpers were starting breakfast in the dining-car
and the doctor and Harrison wanted to walk down to see where the river
had cut into the dike.  Mrs. Whitney had not appeared and they asked
the young ladies to go with them.  Gertrude objected.  A foggy haze
hung over the valley.

"Come along," urged Harrison; "the air will give you an appetite."

After some remonstrating she put on her heavy coat, and carrying
umbrellas the four started under the conductor's guidance across to the
dike.  They picked their steps along curving tracks, between material
piles and through the debris of the night.  On the dike they spent some
time looking at the gaps and listening to explanations of how the river
worked to undermine and how it had been checked.  Watchers hooded in
yellow stickers patrolled the narrow jetties or, motionless, studied
the eddies boiling at their feet.

Returning, the party walked around the edge of the camp where cooks
were busy about steaming kettles.  Under long, open tents wearied men
lying on scattered hay slept after the hardship of the night.  In the
drizzling haze half a dozen men, assistants to the engineer--rough
looking but strong-featured and quick-eyed--sat with buckets of
steaming coffee about a huge campfire.  Four men bearing a litter came
down the path.  Doctor Lanning halted them.  A laborer had been pinched
during the night between loads of piling projecting over the ends of
flat cars and they told the doctor his chest was hurt.  A soiled
neckcloth covered his face but his stertorous breathing could be heard,
and Gertrude Brock begged the doctor to go to the camp with the injured
man and see whether something could not be done to relieve him until
the company surgeon arrived.  The doctor, with O'Brien, turned back.
Gertrude, depressed by the incident, followed Louise and Allen Harrison
along the path which wound round a clump of willows flanking the
campfire.

On the sloping bank below the trees and a little out of the wind a man
on a mattress of willows lay stretched asleep.  He was clad in leather,
mud-stained and wrinkled, and the big brown boots that cased his feet
were strapped tightly above his knees.  An arm, outstretched, supported
his head, hidden under a soft gray hat.  Like the thick gloves that
covered his clasped hands, his hat and the handkerchief knotted about
his neck were soaked by the rain, falling quietly and trickling down
the furrows of his leather coat.  But his attitude was one of
exhaustion, and trifles of discomfort were lost in his deep respiration.

"Oh!" exclaimed Gertrude Brock under her breath, "look at that poor
fellow asleep in the rain.  Allen?"

Allen Harrison, ahead, was struggling to hold his umbrella upright
while he rolled a cigarette.  He turned as he passed the paper across
his lips.

"Throw your coat over him, Allen."

Harrison pasted the paper roll, and putting it to his mouth felt for
his matchcase.  "Throw _my_ coat over him!"

"Yes."

Allen took out a match.  "Well, I like that.  That's like you,
Gertrude.  Suppose you throw your coat over him."

Gertrude looked silently at her companion.  There is a moment when
women should be humored; not all men are fortunate enough to recognize
it.  Louise, still walking ahead, called, "Come on," but Gertrude did
not move.

"Allen, throw your coat over the poor fellow," she urged.  "You
wouldn't let your dog lie like that in the rain."

"But, Gertrude--do me the kindness"--he passed his umbrella to her that
he might better manage the lighting--"he's not my dog."

If she made answer it was only in the expression of her eyes.  She
handed the umbrella back, flung open her long coat and slipped it from
her shoulders.  With the heavy garment in her hands she stepped from
her path toward the sleeper and noticed for the first time an utterly
disreputable-looking dog lying beside him in the weeds.  The dog's long
hair was bedraggled to the color of the mud he curled in, and as he
opened his eyes without raising his head, Gertrude hesitated; but his
tail spoke a kindly greeting.  He knew no harm was meant and he watched
unconcernedly while, determined not to recede from her impulse,
Gertrude stepped hastily to the sleeper's side and dropped her coat
over his shoulders.

Louise was too far ahead to notice the incident.  After breakfast she
asked Gertrude what the matter was.

"Nothing.  Allen and I had our first quarrel this morning."

As she spoke, the train, high in the air, was creeping over the Spider
bridge.




CHAPTER II

AN ERROR AT HEADQUARTERS

When the Brock-Harrison party, familiarly known--among those with whom
they were by no means familiar--as the Steel Crowd, bought the
transcontinental lines that J. S. Bucks, the second vice-president and
general manager, had built up into a system, their first visit to the
West End was awaited with some uneasiness.  An impression prevailed that
the new owners might take decided liberties with what Conductor O'Brien
termed the "personal" of the operating department.

But week after week followed the widely heralded announcement of the
purchase without the looked-for visit from the new owners.  During the
interval West End men from the general superintendent down were
admittedly on edge--with the exception of Conductor O'Brien.  "If I go, I
go," was all he said, and in making the statement in his even,
significant way it was generally understood that the trainman that ran
the pay-cars and the swell mountain specials had in view a
superintendency on the New York Central.  On what he rested his
confidence in the opening no one certainly knew, though Pat Francis
claimed it was based wholly on a cigar in a glass case once given to the
genial conductor by Chauncey M. Depew when travelling special to the
coast under his charge.

Be that as it may, when the West End was at last electrified by the
announcement that the Brock-Harrison syndicate train had already crossed
the Missouri and might be expected any day, O'Brien with his usual luck
was detailed as one of the conductors to take charge of the visitors.

The pang in the operating department was that the long-delayed inspection
tour should have come just at a time when the water had softened things
until every train on the mountain division was run under slow-orders.

At McCloud Vice-president Bucks, a very old campaigner, had held the
party for two days to avoid the adverse conditions in the west and turned
the financiers of the party south to inspect branches while the road was
drying in the hills.  But the party of visitors contained two distinct
elements, the money-makers and the money-spenders--the generation that
made the investment and the generation that distributed the dividends.
The young people rebelled at branch line trips and insisted on heading
for sightseeing and hunting straight into the mountains.  Accordingly, at
McCloud the party split, and while Henry S. Brock and his business
associates looked over the branches, his private cars containing his
family and certain of their friends were headed for the headquarters of
the mountain division, Medicine Bend.

Medicine Bend is not quite the same town it used to be, and
disappointment must necessarily attend efforts to identify the once
familiar landmarks of the mountain division.  Improvement, implacable
priestess of American industry, has well-nigh obliterated the picturesque
features of pioneer days.  The very right of way of the earliest overland
line, abandoned for miles and miles, is seen now from the car windows
bleaching on the desert.  So once its own rails, vigorous and aggressive,
skirted grinning heaps of buffalo bones, and its own tangents were spiked
across the grave of pony rider and Indian brave--the king was: the king
is.

But the Sweetgrass winds are the same.  The same snows whiten the peaks,
the same sun dies in western glory, and the mountains still see nestling
among the tracks at the bend of the Medicine River the first headquarters
building of the mountain division, nicknamed The Wickiup.  What, in the
face of continual and unrelenting changes, could have saved the Wickiup?
Not the fact that the crazy old gables can boast the storm and stress of
the mad railroad life of another day than this--for every deserted curve
and hill of the line can do as much.  The Wickiup has a better claim to
immortality, for once its cracked and smoky walls, raised solely to house
the problems and perplexities of the operating department, sheltered a
pair of lovers, so strenuous in their perplexities that even yet in the
gleam of the long night-fires of the West End their story is told.

In that day the construction department of the mountain division was
cooped up at one end of the hall on the second floor of the building.
Bucks at that time thought twice before he indorsed one of Glover's
twenty-thousand-dollar specifications.  Now, with the department
occupying the entire third floor and pushing out of the dormer windows, a
million-dollar estimate goes through like a requisition for postage
stamps.

But in spite of his hole-in-the-wall office, Glover, the construction
engineer of that day, was a man to be reckoned with in estimates of West
End men.  They knew him for a captain long before he left his mark on the
Spider the time he held the river for a straight week at twenty-eight
feet, bitted and gagged between Hailey's piers, and forced the yellow
tramp to understand that if it had killed Hailey there were equally bad
men left on the mountain pay-roll.  Glover, it may be said, took his
final degrees in engineering in the Grand Canyon; he was a member of the
Bush party, and of the four that got back alive to Medicine one was Ab
Glover.

Glover rebuilt the whole system of snowsheds on the West End, practically
everything from the Peace to the Sierras.  Every section foreman in the
railroad Bad Lands knew Glover.  Just how he happened to lose his
position as chief engineer of the system--for he was a big man on the
East End when he first came with the road--no one certainly knew.  Some
said he spoke his mind too freely--a bad trait in a railroad man; others
said he could not hold down the job.  All they knew in the mountains was
that as a snow fighter he could wear out all the plows on the division,
and that if a branch line were needed in haste Glover would have the
rails down before an ordinary man could get his bids in.

Ordinarily these things are expected from a mountain constructionist and
elicit no comment from headquarters, but the matter at the Spider was one
that could hardly pass unnoticed.  For a year Glover had been begging for
a stenographer.  Writing, to him, was as distasteful as soda-water, and
one morning soon after his return from the valley flood a letter came
with the news that a competent stenographer had been assigned to him and
would report at once for duty at Medicine Bend.

Glover emerged from his hall-office in great spirits and showed the
letter to Callahan, the general superintendent, for congratulations.
"That is right," commented Callahan cynically.  "You saved them a hundred
thousand dollars last month--they are going to blow ten a week on you.
By the way, your stenographer is here."

"He is?"

"She is.  Your stenographer, a very dignified young lady, came in on
Number One.  You had better go and get shaved.  She has been in to
inquire for you and has gone to look up a boarding-place.  Get her
started as soon as you can--I want to see your figures on the Rat Canyon
work."

A helper now would be a boon from heaven.  "But she won't stay long after
she sees this office," Glover reflected ruefully as he returned to it.
He knew from experience that stenographers were hard to hold at Medicine
Bend.  They usually came out for their health and left at the slightest
symptoms of improvement.  He worried as to whether he might possibly have
been unlucky enough to draw another invalid.  And at the very moment he
had determined he would not lose his new assistant if good treatment
would keep her he saw a trainman far down the gloomy hall pointing a
finger in his direction--saw a young lady coming toward him and realized
he ought to have taken time that morning to get shaved.

There was nothing to do but make the best of it; dismissing his
embarrassment he rose to greet the newcomer.  His first reflection was
that he had not drawn an invalid, for he had never seen a fresher face in
his life, and her bearing had the confidence of health itself.

"I heard you had been here," he said reassuringly as the young lady
hesitated at his door.

"Pardon me?"

"I heard you had been here," he repeated with deference.

"I wish to send a despatch," she replied with an odd intonation.  Her
reply seemed so at variance with his greeting that a chill tempered his
enthusiasm.  Could they possibly have sent him a deaf stenographer?--one
worn in the exacting service at headquarters?  There was always a fly
somewhere in his ointment, and so capable and engaging a young lady
seemed really too good to be true.  He saw the message blank in her hand.
"Let me take it," he suggested, and added, raising his voice, "It shall
go at once."  The young lady gave him the message and sitting down at his
desk he pressed an electric call.  Whatever her misfortunes she enlisted
his sympathy instantly, and as no one had ever accused him of having a
weak voice he determined he would make the best of the situation.  "Be
seated, please," he said.  She looked at him curiously.  "Pray, be
seated," he repeated more firmly.

"I desire only to pay for my telegram."

"Not at all.  It isn't necessary.  Just be seated!"

In some bewilderment she sat down on the edge of the chair beside which
she stood.

"We are cramped for room at present in the construction department," he
went on, affixing his frank to the telegram.  "Here, Gloomy, rush this,
my boy," said he to the messenger, who came through a door connecting
with the operator's room.  "But we have the promise of more space soon,"
he resumed, addressing the young lady hopefully.  "I have had your desk
placed there to give you the benefit of the south light