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From the creek they tramped nearly two miles, through the dark gravel-banks of the railroad cut, across the high trestle over Joralemon River where Gertie had to be coaxed from stringer to stringer. They stopped only when a gopher in a clearing demanded attention.
He ran up the slope to the grade and danced in the open door of the boss's shack; and, grinning at the convincing devil of it, they set about their task. Armed with fuse and dynamite they crept along underneath the bank toward the trestle. Werner, as an excuse to linger, carried the fuse; he almost envied the bohunk in the rear with the dynamite.
Often we assembled in a glass house, furnished with trestle tables on which maps were spread, and, thinking back to these scenes, I remember now, as I write, the noise of rain beating on that glass roof, and the clammy touch of fog on the window-panes stealing through the cracks and creeping into the room.
There was a canvas chair or two, a folding table, a large drawing board on a trestle frame, and two cheap, tin lamps. It was obvious that Dick thought of nothing much except his work and had a Spartan disregard for comfort. "A good sort, but it's concrete first and last with him," Jake remarked. "Guess I've got to start by making this shack fit for a white man to live in."
His battered wide hat was shapeless, his duck trousers were badly rent, and the blue shirt, which was all he wore above the waist, hung open half-way down his breast. He was flushed and gasping, but the men upon the trestle were evidently urging him to fresh exertion. "Oh, hit her hard!" shouted one of them; and a comrade clinging to a beam high above the river broke in: "We're waiting.
"It's a habit you have." He rubbed his moustached lips along her bare arm and swung her again to his shoulder. "Low bridge!" She bent from her lofty perch until her cheek lay along his hair, and they passed into the kitchen, where he set her down with elaborate care. "I guess that trestle isn't through with me yet," he observed, a frown marking his forehead.
"Yah, they knelt down on their marrow-bones and begged His Highness to grant them the small boon of letting them put their feet on his neck. They humbly petitioned me to kick over the trestle, pay them ten dollars a day, raise the allowance of pie, and then give them certificates of character. You'd have done it, I suppose.
The white somethings carelessly tossed over a chair near the head of the bed, were no longer the garments of youth, beauty, and innocence, but graveclothes, cold, shining, shuddering, in that deathly light. The touch of the moon, like the presence of a sexton, suggested mortality. The narrow, single bed, with its four black posts, looked like the fatal trestle, or bier.
Then the train crawled over a remembered trestle, and Aladdin knew that he was within four miles of his station, and within three of the St. Johns' house by the best of short cuts across country. He looked precisely in its direction, and kissed his fingers to Margaret, and wondered what she was doing. Then there was a rumbling, jumping jar, and the train stopped. Minute after minute went by.
I remembered the valley, green with trees, and populous with herds, winding down to the lake, and the pretty little town of Josephine. I remembered that gala day when we christened it. I groaned in spirit, as I thought of finding the trestle gone, after our hundred-and-fifty-mile dash through storm and flood. Yet I believed it would be gone. The blows showered upon us had beaten down my courage.
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