ain. I stepped out upon the platform, for
fresh air.

We were traversing the real plains of the Great American Desert, I judged.
The prairie grasses had shortened to brown stubble interspersed with bare
sandy soil rising here and there into low hills. It was a country without
north, south, east, west, save as denoted by the sun, broadly launching
his first beams of the day. Behind us the single track of double rails
stretched straight away as if clear to the Missouri. The dull blare of the
car wheels was the only token of life, excepting the long-eared rabbits
scampering with erratic high jumps, and the prairie dogs sitting bolt
upright in the sunshine among their hillocked burrows. Of any town there
was no sign. We had cut loose from company.

Then we thundered by a freight train, loaded with still more ties and
iron, standing upon a siding guarded by the idling trainmen and by an
operator's shack. Smoke was welling from the chimney of the shack--and
that domestic touch gave me a sense of homesickness. Yet I would not have
been home, even for breakfast. This wide realm of nowhere fascinated with
the unknown.

The train and shack flattened into the landscape. A bevy of antelope
flashed white tails at us as they scudded away. Two motionless figures,
horseback, whom I took to be wild Indians, surveyed us from a distant
sand-hill. Across the river there appeared a fungus of low buildings,
almost indistinguishable, with a glimmer of canvas-topped wagons fringing
it. That was the old emigrant road.

While I was thus orienting myself in lonesome but not entirely hopeless
fashion the car door opened and closed. I turned my head. The Lady of the
Blue Eyes had joined me. As fresh as the morning she was.

"Oh! You? I beg your pardon, sir." She apologized, but I felt that the
diffidence was more politic than sincere.

"You are heartily welcome, madam," I assured. "There is air enough for us
both."

"The car is suffocating," she said. "However, the worst is over. We shall
not have to spend another such a night. You are still for Benton?"

"By all means." And I bowed to her. "We are fellow-travelers to the end, I
believe."

"Yes?" She scanned me. "But I do not like that word: the end. It is not a
popular word, in the West. Certainly not at Benton. For instance----"

We tore by another freight waiting upon a siding located amidst a wide
debris of tin cans, scattered sheet-iron, stark mud-and-stone chimneys,
and barren spo