ing bravely forth to create. Of
what should follow that they did not speak, yet each one guessed what
was in the other's mind, as men and maidens have always guessed since
love began. And on this night there were no serpents at all in their
Eden.

IV

BETWEEN EDENS

The sun of a mid-June day glared down pitilessly on the little station
at the junction of the Sage Brush branch with the main line. There was
not a tree in sight. The south wind was raving across the prairie,
swirling showers of fine sand before it. Its breath came hot against
Jerry Swaim's cheek as she stood in the doorway of the station or
wandered grimly down between the shining rails that stretched toward a
boundless nowhere whither the "through" train had vanished nearly two
hours ago. As Jerry watched it leaving, a sudden heaviness weighed down
upon her. And when the Pullman porter's white coat on the rear platform
of the last coach melted into the dull, diminishing splotch on the
western distance, she felt as if she were shipwrecked in a pathless
land, with the little red station house, reefed about by cinders, as the
only resting-place for the soles of her feet. When her eyes grew weary
of the monotonous landscape, Jerry rested them with what she called "A
Kansas Interior." The rustic station under the maples at "Eden" was
always clean and comfortably appointed. Big flower-beds outside, Uncle
Cornie's gift, belonged to the station and its guests, with the spacious
grounds of "Eden," at which the travelers might gaze without cost, lying
just beyond it.

This "Kansas Interior" seemed only a degree less inviting than the whole
monotonous universe outside. The dust of ages dimmed the windows that
were propped and nailed and otherwise secured against the entrance of
cool summer breezes, or the outlet of bad, overheated air in winter.
Iron-partitioned seats, invention of the Evil One himself, stalled off
three sides of the room, intending to prove the principle that no one
body can occupy two spaces at the same time. In the center of the room a
"plain, unvarnished" stove, bare and bald, stood on a low pedestal
yellowed with time and tobacco juice. A dingy, fly-specked map of the
entire railway system hung askew on the wall--very fat and foreshortened
as to its own extent, very attenuated and ill-proportioned as to other
insignificant systems cutting spidery lines across it.

Behind a sealed tomb of a ticket-window Jerry could hear the "tick-t