le to be up, she had seen cowboys, but they had lacked the dash
and the picturesque costuming of the West she knew. They were mostly
commonplace young men, jogging past the house on horseback, or loitering
down by the corrals. They had offered absolutely no interest or "color"
to the place, and the owner's son, Bob Warfield, had driven her over to
the Quirt in a Ford and had seemed exactly like any other big,
good-looking young man who thought well of himself. Lorraine was not
susceptible to mere good looks, three years with the "movies" having
disillusioned her quite thoroughly. Too many young men of Bob Warfield's
general type had attempted to make love to her--lightly and not too
well--for Lorraine to be greatly impressed.

She yawned, looked at her watch again, found that she had spent exactly
six minutes in meditating upon her immediate surroundings, and fell to
wondering why it was that the real West was so terribly commonplace.
Why, yesterday she had been brought to such a pass of sheer loneliness
that she had actually been driven to reading an old horse-doctor book!
She had learned the symptoms of epizooetic--whatever that was--and
poll-evil and stringhalt, and had gone from that to making a shopping
tour through a Montgomery Ward catalogue. There was nothing else in the
house to read, except a half dozen old copies of the _Boise News_.

There was nothing to do, nothing to see, no one to talk to. Her dad and
the big, heavy-set man whom he called Frank, seemed uncomfortably aware
of their deficiencies and were pitiably anxious to make her feel
welcome,--and failed. They called her "Raine." The other two men did not
call her anything at all. They were both sandy-complexioned and they
both chewed tobacco quite noticeably, and when they sat down in their
shirt sleeves to eat, Lorraine had seen irregular humps in their hip
pockets which must be six-guns; though why they should carry them in
their pockets instead of in holster belts buckled properly around their
bodies and sagging savagely down at one side and swinging ferociously
when they walked, Lorraine could not imagine. They did not wear chaps,
either, and their spurs were just spurs, without so much as a silver
concho anywhere. Cowboys in overalls and blue gingham shirts and faded
old coats whose lapels lay in wrinkles and whose pockets were torn down
at the corners! If Lorraine had not been positive that this was actually
a cattle ranch in Idaho, she never wou