ss herself, the girl from Sunset
Ranch was more than a little disgusted.

"I know I'm a fright. I've got 'such a muchness' of hair and it's so
sunburned, and all! What those girls I'm going to see will say to me, I
don't know. But if they're good-natured they'll soon show me how to handle
this mop--and of course I can buy any quantity of pretty frocks when I get
to New York."

So she only looked at the other people on the train and made no
acquaintances at all that first day. She slept soundly at night while the
Transcontinental raced on over the undulating plains on which the stars
shone so peacefully. Each roll of the drumming wheels was carrying her
nearer and nearer to that new world of which she knew so little, but from
which she hoped so much.

She dreamed that she had reached her goal--Uncle Starkweather's house.
Aunt Eunice met her. She had never even seen a photograph of her aunt; but
the lady who gathered her so closely into her arms and kissed her so
tenderly, looked just as Helen's own mother had looked.

She awoke crying, and hugging the tiny pillow which the Pullman Company
furnishes its patrons as a sample--the _real_ pillow never materializes.

But to the healthy girl from the wide reaches of the Montana range, the
berth was quite comfortable enough. She had slept on the open ground many
a night, rolled only in a blanket and without any pillow at all. So she
arose fresher than most of her fellow-passengers.

One man--whom she had noticed the evening before--was adjusting a wig
behind the curtain of his section. He looked when he was completely
dressed rather a well-preserved person; and Helen was impressed with the
thought that he must still feel young to wish to appear so juvenile.

Even with his wig adjusted--a very curly brown affair--the man looked,
however, to be upward of sixty. There were many fine wrinkles about his
eyes and deep lines graven in his cheeks.

His section was just behind that of the girl from Sunset Ranch, on the
other side of the car. After returning from the breakfast table this first
morning Helen thought she would better take a little more money out of the
wallet to put in her purse for emergencies on the train. So she opened the
locked bag and dragged out the well-stuffed wallet from underneath her
other possessions.

The roll of yellow-backed notes _was_ a large one. Helen, lacking more
interesting occupation, unfolded the crisp banknotes and counted them to
make su