uff would have been left at the post for her,
even though there was no mail. But it could not have passed. She would
have seen the dust, that always hung low over the trail like the drooping
tail of a comet, and when the day was still took half an hour at least to
settle again for the next passer-by. And besides, she had come to know
the tracks the stage left in the trail. It _could not_ have passed. And
it had to come; it carried the government mail. And yet, that dust did
not look like the stage dust. (Trivial worries, you say? Then try living
forty miles from a post office, ten from the nearest neighbor, and
fifteen hundred from your dearly beloved Home Town. Try living there, not
because you want to but because you must; hating it, hungering for human
companionship. Try it with heat and wind and sand and great, arid
stretches of a land that is strange to you. Honestly, I think you would
have been out there just after sunrise to wait for that stage, and if it
were late you would have walked down the trail to meet it!)

Helen May remained by the post, but she got up and stood on a rock that
protruded six inches or so above the sand. Of course she could not see
over the ridge--she could not have done that if she had climbed a
telegraph pole; only there was no pole to climb--but she felt a little
closer to seeing. That dust did not look like stage dust!

You would be surprised to know how much Helen May had learned about dust
clouds. She could tell an automobile ten miles away, just by the swift
gathering of the gray cloud. She could tell where bands of sheep or herds
of cattle were being driven across the plain. She even knew when a saddle
horse was coming, or a freight team or--the stage.

She suddenly owned to herself that she was disappointed and rather
worried. For behind this cloud that troubled her there was no second one
building up over the skyline and growing more dense as the disturber
approached. She could not imagine what had happened to that
red-whiskered, tobacco-chewing stage driver. She looked at her wrist
watch and saw that he was exactly twenty minutes later than his very
latest arrival, and she felt personally slighted and aggrieved.

For that reason she sat under her pink silk parasol and stared crossly
under her eyebrows at the horse and man and the dust-grimed
rattle-wheeled buggy that eventually emerged from the gray cloud. The
horse was a pudgy bay that set his feet stolidly down in the trail,