In his turn Steve set Ragtime's head toward the town in the valley.
And therefore he did not see that Archibald Wickersham was left
standing alone a moment in the middle of the lawn. But Miriam Burrell
saw and understood the black rage that shadowed his face. Long before
then she had penetrated to the layer of vanity beneath his air of
boredom. More than once she had used that knowledge maliciously, to
stir him. And she knew how unending could be his hatred for anyone who
had ever made him appear ridiculous.
CHAPTER XI
I NEVER DID LIKE TO BE BEATEN
Stephen O'Mara found Hardwick Elliott lunching alone in the East Coast
Company's main Morrison office, a big unpainted shack that stood half
lost in a maze of high-piled ties, midway between the saw-mills at the
river edge and the first snarled network of switches converging on one
reddish streak of steel that lanced into the north. With moodily
indifferent interest Elliott scarcely more than glanced up at the
horseman's approach across the open plot of raw earth, hard-packed to a
cement-like surface by the endless passage and repassage of countless
hob-nailed, heavy-booted feet, but with that first glance his forehead
began to smooth a little. His face had lost something of its hint of
gauntness, even before his chief engineer had swung down from the
saddle. Elliott had been exhibiting scant appetite for the cold food
half buried in the pile of papers on his desk top; and though he smiled
his characteristically courteous, mildly abstracted greeting when Steve
loomed in the doorway, his attitude was still very patently that of a
man who attempts to conceal his own perplexities lest they compound
those of another whose perplexities are already more than enough.
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