to the tongue of one famishing in the desert.

First among the others was the bright-haired young woman from Canton,
Ohio, whose gray eyes seemed older than herself, lighting as if with new
hope every time they turned to acknowledge a good wish for her luck in
the new land. It seemed at such moments as if she quickened with the
belief that she was coming upon the track of something which she had
lost, and was in a way of getting trace of it again.

She sat up straight-backed as a saint in a cathedral window, but she
unbent toward June. June was not long in finding out that she, also, was
a product of grand old Molly Bawn, that mighty institution of learning
so justly famed throughout the world for its fudge; that her name was
Agnes Horton, and that she was going to register for a piece of land.

Some five years before June had matriculated, Agnes Horton had stepped
out, finished, from the halls of Molly Bawn.

"She's old," confided June to her mother's ear. "She must be at least
twenty-five!"

Old or young, she was handsomer than any other woman on the train, and
seemingly unaware of it as she leaned her elbow upon the dusty
window-sill and gazed out in pensive introspection upon the bleak land
where glaciers had trampled and volcanoes raged, each of them leaving
its waste of worn stone and blackened ledge.

And there was the school-teacher from Iowa; a long, thin string of a
man, who combed his hair straight back from his narrow, dished forehead
and said "idear." He was thinking seriously of sheep.

And there was the commissary sergeant from Fort Sheridan, which is
within the shadow of Chicago, German-faced, towering, broad. He blushed
as if scandalized every time a woman spoke to him, and he took Limburger
cheese and onions from his cloth telescope grip for his noonday lunch.

And there was the well-mannered manufacturer of tools, who came from
Buffalo, and his bald brother with him, who followed the law. There was
the insurance man from Kansas, who grinned when he wasn't talking and
talked when he didn't grin; and the doctor from Missouri, a large-framed
man with a worn face and anxious look, traveling westward in hope; and
the lumberman from Minnesota, who wore a round hat and looked meek, like
a secretary of a Y. M. C. A., and spat tobacco-juice out of the window.

All of these men, save the school-teacher and manufacturer, were more or
less failures, one way or another. Take the sergeant--Sergeant Schaefer