The Daughter of a Magnate | Page 6

division, Medicine Bend.
Medicine Bend is not quite the same town it used to be, and
disappointment must necessarily attend efforts to identify the once

familiar landmarks of the mountain division. Improvement, implacable
priestess of American industry, has well-nigh obliterated the
picturesque features of pioneer days. The very right of way of the
earliest overland line, abandoned for miles and miles, is seen now from
the car windows bleaching on the desert. So once its own rails,
vigorous and aggressive, skirted grinning heaps of buffalo bones, and
its own tangents were spiked across the grave of pony rider and Indian
brave the king was : the king is.
But the Sweetgrass winds are the same. The same snows whiten the
peaks, the same sun dies in western glory, and the mountains still see
nestling among the tracks at the bend of the Medicine River the first
headquarters building of the mountain division, nicknamed The
Wickiup. What, in the face of continual and unrelenting changes, could
have saved the Wickiup? Not the fact that the crazy old gables can
boast the storm and stress of the mad railroad life of another day than
this for every deserted curve and hill of the line can do as much. The
Wickiup has a better claim to immortality, for once its cracked and
smoky walls, raised solely to house the problems and perplex ities of
the operating department, sheltered a pair of lovers, so strenuous in
their perplexities that even yet in the gleam of the long night-fires of
the West End their story is told.
In that day the construction department of the mountain division was
cooped up at one end of the hall on the second floor of the building.
Bucks at that time thought twice before he indorsed one of Glover's
twenty-thousand-dollar specifications. Now, with the department
occupying the entire third floor and pushing out of the dormer windows,
a million-dollar estimate goes through like a requisition for postage
stamps.
But in spite of his hole-in-the-wall office, Glover, the construction
engineer of that day, was a man to be reckoned with in estimates of
West End men. They knew him for a captain long before he left his
mark on the Spider the time he held the river for a straight week at
twenty-eight feet, bitted and gagged between Hailey's piers, and forced
the yellow tramp to understand that if it had killed Hailey there were

equally bad men left on the mountain pay-roll. Glover, it may be said,
took his final degrees in engineering in the Grand Canon; he was a
member of the Bush party, and of the four that got back alive to
Medicine one was Ab Glover.
Glover rebuilt the whole system of snowsheds on the West End,
practically everything from the Peace to the Sierras. Every section
foreman in the railroad Bad Lands knew Glover. Just how he happened
to lose his position as chief engineer of the system for he was a big man
on the East End when he first came with the road no one certainly knew.
Some said he spoke his mind too freely a bad trait in a railroad man;
others said he could not hold down the job. All they knew in the
mountains was that as a snow fighter he could wear out all the plows on
the division, and that if a branch line were needed in haste Glover
would have the rails down before an ordinary man could get his bids in.
Ordinarily these things are expected from a mountain constructionist
and elicit no comment from headquarters, but the matter at the Spider
was one that could hardly pass unnoticed. For a year Glover had been
begging for a stenographer. Writing, to him, was as distasteful as
soda-water, and one morning soon after his return from the valley flood
a letter came with the news that a competent stenographer had been
assigned to him and would report at once for duty at Medicine Bend.
Glover emerged from his hall-office in great spirits and showed the
letter to Callahan, the general superintendent, for congratulations. "That
is right," commented Callahan cynically. "You saved them a hundred
thousand dollars last month they are going to blow ten a week on you.
By the way, your stenographer is here."
"He is?"
"She is. Your stenographer, a very dignified young lady, came in on
Number One. You had better go and get shaved. She has been in to in
quire for you and has gone to look up a boardingplace. Get her started
as soon as you can I want to see your figures on the Rat Canon work."
A helper now would be a boon from heaven. "But she won't stay long

after she sees this office," Glover reflected ruefully as he returned to