iefly tar-paper shacks or floored and partially
boarded tents, but the sound of the saw and the hammer was heard
week-days and Sundays so no one could doubt but that it was only a
question of time when Crowheart would be comfortably housed. There was
nothing distinctive about Crowheart; it had its prototype in a thousand
towns between Peace River and the Rio Grande; it was typical of the
settlements which are springing up every year along the lines of those
railroads that are stretching their tentacles over the Far West. Yet the
hopes of Crowheart expressed themselves in boulevards outlined with new
stakes and in a park which should, some day, be a breathing spot for a
great city. It was Crowheart's last thought that it should remain
stationary and obscure.

To Dr. Harpe swinging down from the high step of the single passenger
coach in the mixed train of coal and cattle cars, it looked like a
highly colored picture on a drop-curtain. The effect was impressionistic
and bizarre as it lay in the gorgeous light of the setting sun, yet it
pleased and rested the eye of the woman whose thoughts had not been
conducive to an appreciation of scenery during the journey past.

As she drew a deep breath of the thin, stimulating air, the tension
lessened on her strained nerves. She looked back at the interminable
miles over which she had come, the miles which lay between her and the
nightmare of disgrace and failure she had left, and then at the new,
untried field before her. The light of new hope shone in her handsome
hazel eyes, and there was fresh life in her step as she picked up her
suitcase and started across the railroad track toward the town.

"Emma Harpe ... St. Louis," she wrote boldly upon the bethumbed register
of the Terriberry House.

The loungers in the office studied her signature earnestly but it told
them nothing of that which they most wished to know--her business. She
might be selling books upon the instalment plan: she might be peddling
skin-food warranted to restore their weather-beaten complexions to the
texture of a baby's: she _might_ be a new inmate for the dance hall.
Anything was possible in Crowheart.

She was the object of interested glances as she ate her supper in the
long dining-room for, although she was nearly thirty, there was still
something of girlhood in her tired face. But she seemed engrossed in her
own thoughts and returned to her room as soon as she had eaten. There
she lay down upon th