full. Brit always meant to throw out that empty pepper can and
always neglected to do so. Just now he remembered picking up the empty
one and shaking it over the potatoes futilely and then changing it for
the full one. But he did not take it away; in the wilderness one learns
to save useless things in the faint hope that some day they may become
useful. The shelves were cluttered with fit companions to that empty
pepper can. Brit thought that he would have "cleaned out" had he known
that Lorraine was coming. Since she was here, it scarcely seemed worth
while.

He walked on his boot-toes to the door of the second room of the cabin,
listened there for a minute, heard no sound and took a tablet and pencil
off another shelf littered with useless things. The note which he wrote
painstakingly, lest she might think him lacking in education, he laid
upon the table beside Lorraine's plate; then went out, closing the door
behind him as quietly as a squeaking door can be made to close.

Lorraine, in the other room, heard the squeak and sat up. Her wrist
watch, on the chair beside her bed, said that it was fifteen minutes
past six, which she considered an unearthly hour for rising. She pulled
up the covers and tried to sleep again. The day would be long enough, at
best. There was nothing to do, unless she took that queer old horse with
withers like the breastbone of a lean Christmas turkey and hips that
reminded her of the little roofs over dormer windows, and went for a
ride. And if she did that, there was nowhere to go and nothing to do
when she arrived there.

In a very few days Lorraine had exhausted the sights of Quirt Creek and
vicinity. If she rode south she would eventually come to the top of a
hill whence she could look down upon further stretches of barrenness. If
she rode east she would come eventually to the road along which she had
walked from Echo, Idaho. Lorraine had had enough of that road. If she
went north she would--well, she would not meet Mr. Lone Morgan again,
for she had tried it twice, and had turned back because there seemed no
end to the trail twisting through the sage and rocks. West she had not
gone, but she had no doubt that it would be the same dreary monotony of
dull gray landscape.

Monotony of landscape was one thing which Lorraine could not endure,
unless it had a foreground of riders hurtling here and there, and of
perspiring men around a camera tripod. At the Sawtooth ranch, after she
was ab