"Who taught you thoughtfulness?" she asked, gravely. He stood
disconcerted. "I find consideration common among Western men," she
went on, generalizing prettily; "our men don't have it. Does a life so
rough and terrible as this give men the consideration that we expect
elsewhere and do not find? Ah, that poor shoveller. Isn't it horrible
to die so? Did everyone else escape?"
"They are ready to start, I think," he suggested, uneasily.
"Oh, are they?"
"You are coming to see us?" called Marie, leaning from the top, while
Glover paused behind her sister, when they had reached the stage. He
stood with his hat in his hand. The dazzling sun made copper of the
swarthy brown of his lower face and brought out the white of his
forehead where the hair crisped wet in the heat of the morning.
Gertrude Brock, after she had gained her seat with his help, looked
down while he talked; looked at the top of his head, and listening
vaguely to Marie, noted his long, bony hand as it clung to the window
strap--the hand of the most audacious man she had ever met in her
life--who had made an avowal to her on the observation platform of her
father's own car--and she mused at the explosion that would have
followed had she ever breathed a syllable of the circumstance to her
own fiery papa.
But she had told no one--least of all, the young man that had asked her
before she left Pittsburg to marry him and was now writing her every
other day--Allen Harrison. Indeed, what could be more ridiculously
embarrassing than to be assailed so unexpectedly? She had no mind to
make herself anyone's laughing-stock by speaking of it. One thing,
however, she had vaguely determined--since Glover had frightened her
she would retaliate at least a little before she returned to the quiet
of Fifth Avenue.
Marie was still talking to him. "Why haven't you heard? I thought
sister would have told you. The doctor says I gained faster here than
anywhere between the two oceans, and we are all to spend six weeks up
at Glen Tarn Springs. Papa is going East and coming back after us, and
we shall expect you to come to the Springs very often."
The stage was starting. Gertrude faced backward as she sat. She could
see Glover's salutation, and she waved a glove. He was as utterly
confused as she could desire. She saw him rejoin his companion
engineer near where lay the shoveller with the covered face, and the
thought of the terrible accident depressed her. As she last saw Glover
he was pointing at the faulty bank, and she knew that the two men were
planning again for the safety of the men.
About Glen Tarn, now quite the best known of the Northern mountain
resorts, there is no month like October: no sun like the October sun,
and no frost like the first that stills the aspen. Moreover, the
travel is done, the parks are deserted, the mountains robing for
winter. In October, the horse, starting, shrinks under his rider, for
the lion, always moving, never seen, is following the game into the
valleys, leaving the grizzly to beat his stubborn retreat from the snow
line alone.