prediction wrought itself out into sober fact. After the single appeal
to force, Mr. Darrah seemed to give up the fight. None the less, the
departure of the Rosemary was delayed, and its hospitable door was
always open to the Utah chief of construction and his assistant.

It was very deftly done, and even Adams, the clear-eyed, could not
help admiring the Rajah's skilful finesse. Of formal dinner-givings
there might easily have been an end, since the construction camp had
nothing to offer in return. But the formalities were studiously
ignored, and the two young men were put upon a footing of intimacy and
encouraged to come and go as they pleased.

Winton took his welcome broadly, as what lover would not? and within a
week was spending most of his evenings in the Rosemary--this at a time
when every waking moment of the day and night was deeply mortgaged to
the chance of success. For now that the Rajah had withdrawn his
opposition, Nature and the perversity of inanimate things had taken a
hand, and for a fortnight the work of track-laying paused fairly
within sight of the station at Argentine.

First it was a carload of steel accidentally derailed and dumped into
Quartz Creek at precisely the worst possible point in the lower
canyon, a jagged, rock-ribbed, cliff-bound gorge where each separate
piece of metal had to be hoisted out singly by a derrick erected for
the purpose--a process which effectually blocked the track for three
entire days. Next it was another landslide (unhelped by dynamite,
this) just above the station, a crawling cataract of loose, sliding
shale which, painstakingly dug out and dammed with plank bulkhead
during the day, would pour down and bury bulkhead, buttresses, and the
very right of way in the night.