the lavender silks wore a peculiarly cynical smile. Loafers
sat up and followed the stage with eager eyes far as they could see it
and said, "By Gawd--whose gurl is that?" Oh, Mr. Bat Brydges intended
every bar room buffer and loafer in the State should know, 'whose girl'
that was before night. Everything was fair in love and war; and Bat
considered he had run down a case of both. According to his lights, he
had; but his lights were smutty and in need of trimming.

The stage dropped the gold teeth at a dentist's office, and the
lavender silks at a manicure's 'studio,' I believe she called it; and
Bat swung off while the coach was still moving; and Eleanor reluctantly
gave up the reins at the transcontinental station.

"Thank you so much. I don't know when I have had as good a time," she
said, giving the stage driver the sensation of a king in disguise.

And, of course, the transcontinental was late. When was it not late,
when you were in a hurry?

"How late?"

"Four hours, last report," the operator answered.

She sent her suit case across to the hotel, and shopped, and loitered
up and down the platform. It was not until afterwards she remembered
one of the loafer brigade dangling legs from the station platform
looking over his shoulder with an evil smile.

"Say--d' y' see the evening paper?" he had asked. "That's her;" and
there was a laugh that somehow sent her back inside the station feeling
vaguely uneasy.

"I think I'll telephone them up at the Ranch not to keep dinner
waiting," she said to the operator.

He was reading the paper. He looked at her a moment before answering.
If a human face could have been expressed in a punctuation mark, that
agent's face should have been drawn in a big question mark, with the
eyes put somewhere in the hook, and the neck growing longer and longer
as he looked.

"Public telephone right across the road," he said.

In avoidance of the loafers' looks, she had walked unheeding straight
into the Senator's office. Her first instinct was to withdraw. Then,
she saw Brydges; and that curious sensation of repulsion obsessed her.
She literally shot the handy man in full retreat with one glance.
Then, the joy of the ride down, the heroism of the driver, came back.
Perhaps it was the jar of roses, but the thought came what if _she_
could find that vein of heroism in the Senator. When women risk their
souls on that "if" and the souls of friends and children; is it vanity,