Not until the morning of the third day when reports came in of the unheard-of temperatures in the North and West did the weather cause real apprehension. The division never had been in such a position to protect its winter traffic--for a year Callahan, Blood, and Glover had been overhauling and assembling the old and the new bucking equipment. But the wind settled at last in the northeast, and when it stilled the mercury sunk, and when it rose the snow fell, roofing the sheds on the passes, levelling the lower gulches, and piling up reserves along the cuts. The first trouble came on the main line in the Heart Mountains, and Morris Blood, with the roadmaster of the sixth district and Benedict Morgan, got after it with a crew together. Between the C bridge and Potter's Gap they spent two days with a rotary and a flanger and three consolidated engines and went home, leaving everything swept clean, only to learn in the morning that west of the gap there were four feet of fresh snow clear to Rozelle. From the northern ranges came unusual reports of the continued severity of the storms. It was hardly a series of storms, for that winter the first storm that crossed the line lasted three weeks. In the interval Bucks was holding to the directors at Medicine Bend, waiting for the weather to settle enough to send them to the coast. The Pittsburg party waited at Glen Tarn for Mr. Brock's word to join him. At the Bend, Gertrude made love to her father, forfending the awful moment of disclosure that must come, and the cause of her hidden happiness and trouble strenuously made love to her. To the joy of the conspirators, Bucks held Glover closely at headquarters, keeping him closeted for long periods on the estimates that were in final cooking for the directors; and so dense are great people and so keen the simple, that Gertrude held her lone seat of honor beside her father, at the table of the great financiers in the dining-room, without the remotest suspicion on their parts that the superb woman meeting them three times a day was carrying on a proudly-hidden love affair with the muscular, absorbed-looking man who sat alone across the aisle. But the asthmatic old pastry cook, who weighed at least two hundred and thirty pounds and had not even seen the inside of the dining-room for three years, was thoroughly posted on every observable phase of the affair down to the dessert orders; and no one acquainted with the frank profanity of a mountain meat cook will doubt that the best of everything went hot from the range to Glover and Gertrude. Dollar tips and five-dollar tips from Eastern epicures could not change this, for the meals were served by waitresses who felt a personal responsibility in the issue of the pretty affair of the heart.