“D-d-devil!” gritted the Rajah, smiting the hand-rail with his clenched fist. “Hah! I beg your pahdon, my deahs--a meah slip of the tongue.” And then, to the full as savagely: “By Heaven, I hope that train will fly the track and ditch him before eveh he comes within ordering distance of the work in Qua'tz Creek Canyon!” “Why, Uncle Somerville--how vindictive!” cried Virginia. “Who is he, and what has he done?” “He is Misteh John Winton, as you informed me just now; one of the brainiest constructing engineers in this entiah country, and the hardest man in this or any otheh country to down in a right-of-way fight--that's who he is. And it's not what he's done, my deah Virginia, it's what he is going to do. If I can't get him killed up out of ouh way,”--but here Mr. Darrah saw the growing terror in two pairs of eyes, and realizing that he was committing himself before an unsympathetic audience, beat a hasty retreat to his stronghold at the other end of the Rosemary. “Well!” said the flaxen-haired Bessie, catching her breath. But Virginia laughed. “I'm glad I'm not Mr. Winton,” she said. IV. THE CRYSTALLINE ALTITUDES Morning in the highest highlands of the Rockies, a morning clear, cold, and tense, with a bell-like quality in the frosty air to make the cracking of a snow-laden spruce-bough resound like a pistol-shot. For Denver and the dwellers on the eastern plain the sun is an hour high; but the hamlet mining-camp of Argentine, with its dovecote railway station and two-pronged siding, still lies in the steel-blue depths of the canyon shadow. Massive mountains, dark green to the timber line and dazzling white above it, shut in the narrow valley to right and left. A mimic torrent, ice-bound in the quieter pools, drums and gurgles on its descent midway between two railway embankments, the one to which the station and side-tracks belong, old and well-settled, the other new and as yet unballasted. Just opposite the pygmy station a lateral gorge intersects the main canyon, making a deep gash in the opposing mountain bulwark, around which the new line has to find its way by a looping detour. In a scanty widening of the main canyon a few hundred yards below the station a graders' camp of rude slab shelters is turning out its horde of wild-looking Italians; and on a crooked spur track fronting the shanties blue wood-smoke is curling lazily upward from the kitchen car of a construction train.