ouse receives his superlative distinction
in "He."

Again the locomotive shrieked, again the girl mechanically clutched the
suit-case, as presenting the most difficult item in the problem of
transportation, and this time the shriek was not an idle formality. The
train slowed down; the uneasy sleepers behind the green-striped curtains
stirred restlessly with the lessening motion of their uncouth cradle. The
porter came to help her, with the chastened mien of one whose hopes of
largess are small, the lady with the barnacles called after her redundant
farewells, and a moment later Miss Carmichael was standing on the station
platform looking helplessly after the train that toiled and puffed, yet
seemed, in that crystalline atmosphere, still within arm's-reach. She
watched it till its floating pennant of smoke was nothing but a gray
feather blowing farther and farther out of sight on the flat prairie.

The town--it would be unkind to mention its name--had made merry the night
before at the comprehensive invitation of a sheepman who had just disposed
of his wool-clip, and who said, by way of general summons, "What's the use
of temptin' the bank?" "Town," therefore, when Mary Carmichael first made
its acquaintance, was still sleeping the sleep of the unjust. Those among
last night's roisterers who had had to make an early start for their camps
were well into the foot-hills by this time, and would remember with
exhilaration the cracked tinkle of the dance-hall piano as inspiring music
when the lonesomeness of the desert menaced and the young blood again
clamored for its own.

"Town"--it contained in all some two dozen buildings--was very unlovely in
slumber. It sprawled in the lap of the prairies, a grimy-faced urchin,
with the lines of dismal sophistication writ deep. Yet where in all the
"health resorts" of the East did air sweep from the clean hill-country
with such revivifying power? It seemed a glad world of abiding youth.
Surely "Town" was but a dreary illusion, a mirage that hung in the
unmapped spaces of this new world that God had made and called good; an
omen of the abominations that men would make when they grew blind to the
beauty of God's world.

Mary Carmichael, with much the feelings of a cat in a strange garret,
wandered about the sluggard town; and presently the blue-and-white sign of
a telegraph office, with the mythological figure of a hastening messenger,
suggested to her that a reassuring telegram was on