"I heard you telling brother at the dinner-table in Chicago that you were able to see more in this wilderness than you have ever been able to make any one else see. Can I see it with the glass?" "Hardly," he smiled. "I was trying to tell your brother of the magnificent possibilities of the country lying between this and that farthest mountain range; the country we are going to open up. It was a gospel I had been trying to preach to the directors, but none of them believed--not even your uncle." "I see nothing but vastness and cold gray grandeurs," she said, adding: "and the very bigness of it makes me feel like a mere atom, or a molecule--whichever is the smaller." "Yet it is a new empire in the rough," he rejoined, with a touch of the old enthusiasm, "waiting only for the coming of this"--putting his foot again upon the steel of the new railroad line. "What you are looking at has been called a part of the Great American Desert--the most forbidding part, in the stories of the early explorers. Notwithstanding, there will come a time when you can focus your glass here on this mountain and look out over what the promoters will then be advertising as a 'peopled paradise,' and these 'logs of wood in a row, with two strands of iron to fasten them together' will bring it to pass." There was a flash of the enthusiast's fire in the cool gray eyes to go with the words, and Miss Adair wondered at it. He had stood for her as an embodiment of things practical and prosaic; as one too keenly watchful and alert on the purely industrial side to be in any sense a dreamer of dreams. Some part of her thought slipped into speech. "No, I am not an enthusiast," he denied, in reply to her charge. "At bottom, I'm only an engineer, with an ambition to build railroads. But I should have learned no more than half of my trade if I couldn't tell where it would be profitable to build them." "Never mind: you seem to have convinced Uncle Sidney and the directors finally," she commented. "No; your uncle and the directors are not empire builders--meaning to be," he objected. "They are after the present visible dollar in a western outlet for the Pacific Southwestern. If we reach Green Butte before our competitors can broaden their narrow gauge to that point, we shall have a practicable line from Chicago to the Pacific coast." "I understand," she said. "But yours is the higher ideal--the true American ideal." "It's business," he asserted. "Well, isn't business the very heart and soul of the American ideal?" she laughed. This time he laughed with her, forgetting his troubles for the moment. "I guess it is, in the last analysis," he said. And then: "I'm sorry to keep you waiting so long, if you are anxious to get back to the Nadia. But I warned you beforehand. I must keep my appointment with Frisbie. Do you see anything of him?" This because she was again sweeping the western wilderness with the field-glass. "What am I to look for?" "The smoke of an engine."