ounting the seconds until it should start. Once she
trembled when she saw Shackleby hurry along the platform, but she
breathed again when he hailed a man leaning out from the vestibule of a
car. At last, the big bell clanged, and the Atlantic express, rolling
out of the station, began its race across the continent.

It was nearly dusk when, with a scream of brakes, the cars lurched into
a desolate mountain station, and Millicent shivered as she alighted in
the frost-dried dust of snow. A nipping wind sighed down the valley.
The tall firs on the hillside were fading into phantom battalions of
climbing trees, and above them towered a dim chaos of giant peaks,
weirdly awe-inspiring under the last faint glimmer of the dying day. A
few lights blinked among the lower firs, and Millicent, hurrying
towards them at the station agent's direction, was greeted by the odors
of coarse tobacco as she pushed open the door of the New Eldorado
saloon.

A group of bronze-faced men, some in jackets of fringed deerskin and
some in coarse blue jean, sat about the stove, and, though Millicent
involuntarily shrank from them, there was no reason why she should feel
any fear in their presence. They were rude of aspect--on occasion more
rude of speech--but, in all the essentials that become a man, she would
have found few to surpass them in either English or Western cities.
There was dead silence as she entered, and the others copied him when
one of the loungers, rising, took off his shapeless hat, not
ungracefully.

"I want a guide and good horse to take me to Thurston's camp in the
Orchard River Canyon to-night," she said.

The men looked at one another, and the one who rose first replied:
"Sorry to disappoint you, ma'am, but it's clean impossible. We'll have
snow by morning, and it's steep chances a man couldn't get through in
the dark now the shelf on the wagon trail's down."

"I must go. It is a matter of life and death, and I'm willing to pay
whoever will guide me proportionate to the risk," insisted Millicent,
shaking out on the table a roll of bills. Then, because she was a
woman of quick perceptions, and noticed something in the big axeman's
honest face, she added quickly, "I am in great distress, and disaster
may follow every moment lost. Is there nobody in this settlement with
courage enough to help me?"

This time the listeners whispered as they glanced sympathetically at
the speaker. The big man said:

"If you're w