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Despite the rain it was warm and we sat on a bench under the broad roof of the platform. I did my best to take her mind away from the dread which possessed her, but it was a wretched hour for both of us. Then we saw the flicker of lights down the track, and toward us came a small army of labourers who had been clearing the roadbed between us and Woodvale.
"Oh, you Merry Olds, you Merry Olds, you Merry Olds," Wemple muttered aloud, as if in prayer, as he wrestled the car about the narrow area, gaining sometimes inches in pivoting it, sometimes fetching back up the inner wall precisely at the spot previously attained, and, once, having the car, with the surface of the roadbed under it, slide bodily and sidewise, two feet down the road.
Alone he had been over every foot of that all but completed stretch which ended at the border of swampland, there at headquarters, troubling himself not at all over the unevenness of the roadbed, satisfied entirely with the surety he gained with every inspected mile, that a train-load of logs or a dozen train-loads, would stay on the rails when the rails were laid, and the day came to set wheels rolling.
"Yes, Miss Warfield," replied the man, "it's supposed to be, but every roadbed gets a spread rail sometimes." Then he added: "It has to be mighty solid to hold these hundred ton engines on the rails at sixty miles an hour." "It does hold them," said Marion. "Yes, Miss Warfield, usually," said the man. "Then why should it fail here?" The man's big grimy face wrinkled into a sort of smile.
To the left the chaparral rose from the trail's edge in dense solidity, exhaling rich earth scents and the aromatic breath of pine and bay. The roadbed was torn to pieces, ruts knee-high; the stones, washed loose of soil, ringing to the blow of a moving hoof. A rider, advancing slowly, had noticed this and with a jerk of his rein, directed his horse to the oozy grass along the side.
He could see absolutely nothing. And if that increased or accentuated his sense of hearing, it helped little the roar of the racing car beat upon his eardrums the more heavily, that was all. He could tell, of course, the nature of the roadbed.
Tunnel after tunnel through solid rock, the most superb masonry and bridges wherever streams intervene, the best of ballast to make an enduring roadbed all these indicate the style of the new, not "improved" but utterly reconstructed, line which is building for Japan's benefit at China's expense at China's expense directly if she buys it back in 1932, at China's expense indirectly if she doesn't.
When they reached the tracks, they dismounted and tied their ponies to neighboring telegraph poles, fearing the effect the noise of the train would have on the spirited animals. Then the boys went to the roadbed to await the coming of the train. The line stretched straight toward the west, until the rails seemed to join in the distance.
The wind, which instantly attacked them as they reached the level, seemed to make the driver's theory plausible, and for half a mile the roadbed was swept clean, and frozen hard. Further on a tongue of snow, extending from a boulder to the right, reached across their path to the height of two or three feet.
Lord Ralles was a little, well-built chap, not half so English as Albert Cullen, quick in manner and thought, being in this the opposite of his brother Captain Ackland, who was heavy enough to rock-ballast a roadbed. Both brothers gave me the impression of being gentlemen, and both were decidedly good-looking. After the introductions, Mr.
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