lroad
men, was jerking along through the hot afternoon over the monotonous
country between Holdredge and Cheyenne. Besides the blond man and himself
the only occupants of the car were two dusty, bedraggled-looking girls
who had been to the Exposition at Chicago, and who were earnestly
discussing the cost of their first trip out of Colorado. The four
uncomfortable passengers were covered with a sediment of fine, yellow
dust which clung to their hair and eyebrows like gold powder. It blew up
in clouds from the bleak, lifeless country through which they passed,
until they were one colour with the sage-brush and sand-hills. The grey
and yellow desert was varied only by occasional ruins of deserted towns,
and the little red boxes of station-houses, where the spindling trees
and sickly vines in the blue-grass yards made little green reserves
fenced off in that confusing wilderness of sand.

As the slanting rays of the sun beat in stronger and stronger through the
car-windows, the blond gentleman asked the ladies' permission to remove
his coat, and sat in his lavender striped shirtsleeves, with a black silk
handkerchief tucked about his collar. He had seemed interested in
Everett since they had boarded the train at Holdredge; kept glancing at
him curiously and then looking reflectively out of the window, as though
he were trying to recall something. But wherever Everett went, some one
was almost sure to look at him with that curious interest, and it had
ceased to embarrass or annoy him. Presently the stranger, seeming
satisfied with his observation, leaned back in his seat, half closed his
eyes, and began softly to whistle the Spring Song from _Proserpine_, the
cantata that a dozen years before had made its young composer famous in a
night. Everett had heard that air on guitars in Old Mexico, on mandolins
at college glees, on cottage organs in New England hamlets, and only
two weeks ago he had heard it played on sleigh-bells at a variety theatre
in Denver. There was literally no way of escaping his brother's
precocity. Adriance could live on the other side of the Atlantic, where
his youthful indiscretions were forgotten in his mature achievements, but
his brother had never been able to outrun _Proserpine_,--and here he
found it again, in the Colorado sand-hills. Not that Everett was exactly
ashamed of _Proserpine_; only a man of genius could have written it, but
it was the sort of thing that a man of genius outgrows as soon as