Atlas Shrugged [489]
"Is that what you want to do?" he asked.
"That is what I want to do-" she answered, and stopped before she uttered the rest of the answer in her mind: more than anything else in the world.
He was still smiling, it was a smile of amusement, but it was as if amusement could be transmuted into some shining glory. "All right, Miss Taggart," he said, "I'll hire you."
She inclined her head in a dryly formal acknowledgment. "Thank you,"
"I will pay you ten dollars a month, in addition to your room and board."
"Very well,"
"I shall be the first man in this valley to hire a servant." He got up, reached into his pocket and threw a five-dollar gold piece down on the table. "As advance on your wages," he said.
She was startled to discover, as her hand reached for the gold piece, that she felt the eager, desperate, tremulous hope of a young girl on her first job: the hope that she would be able to deserve it.
"Yes, sir," she said, her eyes lowered.
Owen Kellogg arrived on the afternoon of her third day in the valley.
She did not know which shocked him most: the sight of her standing on the edge of the airfield as he descended from the plane-the sight of her clothes: her delicate, transparent blouse, tailored by the most expensive shop in New York, and the wide, cotton-print skirt she had bought in the valley for sixty cents-her cane, her bandages or the basket of groceries on her arm.
He descended among a group of men, he saw her, he stopped, then ran to her as if flung forward by some emotion so strong that, whatever its nature, it looked like terror.
"Miss Taggart . . ." he whispered-and said nothing else, while she laughed, trying to explain how she had come to beat him to his destination.
He listened, as if it were irrelevant, and then he uttered the thing from which he had to recover, "But we thought you were dead."
"Who thought it?"
"All of us . . . I mean, everybody in the outside world."
Then she suddenly stopped smiling, while his voice began to recapture his story and his first sound of joy.
"Miss Taggart, don't you remember? You told me to phone Winston, Colorado, and to tell them that you'd be there by noon of the next day. That was to be the day before yesterday, May thirty-first. But you did not reach Winston-and by late afternoon, the news was on all the radios that you were lost in a plane crash somewhere in the Rocky Mountains."
She nodded slowly, grasping the events she had not thought of considering.
"I heard it aboard the Comet," he said. "At a small station in the middle of New Mexico, The conductor held us there for an hour, while I helped him to check the story on long-distance phones. He was hit by the news just as I was. They all were-the train crew, the station agent, the switchmen. They huddled around me while I called the city rooms of newspapers in Denver and New York. We didn't learn much.
Only that you had left the Afton airfield just before dawn on May thirty-first, that you seemed to be following some stranger's plane, that the attendant had seen you go off southeast-and that nobody had seen you since . . . And that searching parties were combing the Rockies for the wreckage of your plane."
She asked involuntarily, "Did the Comet reach San Francisco?"
"I don't know. She was crawling north through Arizona, when I gave up. There were too many delays, too many things going wrong, and a total confusion of orders. I got off and spent the night hitchhiking my way to Colorado, bumming rides on trucks, on buggies, on horse carts, to get there on time-to get to our meeting place, I mean, where we gather for Midas' ferry plane to pick us up and bring us here."
She started walking slowly up the path toward the car she had left in front of Hammond's Grocery Market. Kellogg followed, and when he spoke again, his voice dropped a little, slowing down with their steps, as if there were something