She laughed softly. "You are fond of the mountains."
"I have little else," he repeated.
"Then they ought to be loyal to you. But the first impression--it
hardly remains, I suppose?"
"I am not sure. They don't grow any smaller; sometimes I think they
grow bigger."
"Then you are fond of them. That's constancy, and constancy is a
capital test of a charm."
"But I'm never sure whether they are, as you say, loyal to me. We had
once on this division a remarkable man named Hailey--a bridge engineer,
and a very great one. He and I stood one night on a caisson at the
Spider Water--the first caisson he put into the river--do you remember
that big river you crossed on the plains----"
"Indeed! I am not likely to forget a night I spent at the Spider
Water; continue."
"Hailey put in the bridge there. 'This old stream ought to be thankful
to you, Hailey, for a piece of work like this,' I said to him. 'No,'
he answered, quite in earnest; 'the Spider doesn't like me. It will
get me some time.' So I think about these mountains. I like them, and
I don't like them. Sometimes I think as Hailey thought of the
Spider--and the Spider did get him."
"How serious you grow!" she exclaimed, lightly.
"The truce ends to-morrow."
"And the journey ends," she remarked, encouragingly.
"What, please, does that line mean that I see so often, 'Journeys end
in lovers meeting?'"
"I haven't an idea. But, oh, these mountains!" she exclaimed, stepping
in caution to the guard-rail. "Could anything be more awful than
this?" They were crawling antlike up a mountain spur that rose dizzily
on their right; on the left they overhung a bottomless pit. Their
engines churned, panted, and struggled up the curve, and as they talked
the dense smoke from the stacks sucked far down into the gap they were
skirting.
"The roadbed is chiselled out of the granite all along here. This is
the famed Mount Pilot on the left, and this the worst spot on the
division for snow. You wouldn't think of extending our truce?"
"To-morrow we leave for the coast."
"But you could leave the truce; and I want it ever so much."
She laughed. "Why should one want a truce after the occasion for it
has passed?"
"Sometimes out here in the desert we get away from water. You don't
know, of course, what it is to want water? I lost a trail once in the
Spanish Sinks and for two days I wanted water."
"Dreadful. I have heard of such things. How did you ever find your
way again?"
He hesitated. "Sometimes instinct serves after reason fails. It
wasn't very good water when I reached it, but I did not know about that
for two weeks. It is a curious thing, too--physiologists, I am told,
have some name for the mental condition--but a man that has suffered
once for water will at times suffer intensely for it again, even though
you saturate him with water, drown him in it."