"Yes; and that was what set off the final fireworks." She put her hands on his shoulders and made him face her squarely. "Stuart, did you lose your temper?" "I--I'm afraid I did--just at the last, you know. It's simply an unspeakable state of affairs, Alicia, dear! At a moment when we should be setting the whole world afire in a superhuman effort to flog this piece of construction track into shape, your uncle paralyzes everything!" The constraining touch of her hands became almost a caress. "What shall you do, Stuart? Is there nothing to be done?" He took his resolution on the spur of the moment. "Yes, thank heaven! Your uncle has got to find a printing press, or at least a telegraph wire, before he can make my discharge effective. Before he can do that, or until he does it, I'm going to pull the throttle wide open and race that discharge circular, if I go to jail for it, afterward! Who knows but I shall have time to save the day for the company after all? Good-by, dearest. In twenty minutes I shall be riding for the MacMorroghs' camp, and when I get there--" "You are going to ride back?--alone? Oh, no, no!" she protested; and the clinging arms held him. "Why, Alicia, girl--see here: what do you imagine could happen to me? Why, bless your loving heart, I've been tramping and riding this desert more or less for two years! What has come over you?" "I don't know; but--but--oh, me! you will think I am miserably weak and foolish: but just as you said that, I seemed to see you lying in the road with your horse standing over you--and you were--dead!" "Nonsense!" he comforted. "I'll be back here to-morrow, alive and well; but I mustn't lose a minute now. It's up to me to reach Horse Creek before the news of the gold strike gets there. There'll be a stampede, with every laborer on the line hoofing it for Copah. Good-by, sweetheart, and--may I?" He took her face between his hands and did it anyhow. Five minutes later he was bargaining for a saddle horse at the one livery stable in the camp, offering and paying the selling price of the animal for the two days' hire. It was a rather sorry mount at that, and when he was dragging it out into the street, Jack Benson, the youngest member of his staff, rode up, that moment in from the tie-camp above Cow Mountain. "Don't dismount, Jack," he ordered curtly. "You're just in time to save me eight or ten miles, when the inches are worth dollars. Ride for the end-of-track and Frisbie on a dead run. Tell Dick to hold his men, if he has to do it at the muzzle of a gun, and to come on with the track, night and day. He'll have to raise the pay, and keep on raising it--but that's all right. It's an order. Rush it!" Benson nodded, set his horse at the path leading up to the railroad grade, and spurred up the hill. Ford gave a final tug at his saddle cinches, put up a leg and began to pick his way down the thronged street in the opposite direction.