e for a change; anywhere to get away, for a time, from the scenes
and remembrances of the valley and town of Willowby.

At dark he rode into a village at the mouth of a gorge. Lights gleamed
from the windows. A strong breeze came from the gorge, and the trees
which lined the one stony street all leaned away from the mountain.
Rupert had never been in the place before, but he had heard of Windtown.
Was there a hotel? he asked a passer-by. No; but they took lodgers at
Smith's, up the hill. At Smith's he, therefore, put up his horse and
secured supper and bed. Until late at night he walked up and down
Windtown's one street, and even climbed the cliffs above the town.

Next morning he was out early, and entered the canyon as the sun began
to illumine its rocky domes and cast long shafts of light across the
chasm. A summer morning ride through a canyon of the Rockies is always
an inspiration, but Rupert was not conscious of it. Again, at noon, he
fed his horse a bag of grain, and let him crop the scanty bunch-grass on
the narrow hillside. A slice of bread from his pocket, dipped into the
clear stream, was his own meal. Then, out of the canyon, and up the
mountain, and over the divide he went. All that afternoon he rode over a
stretch of sagebrush plain. It was nearly midnight when he stopped at a
mining camp. In the morning he sold his horse for three twenty-dollar
gold pieces, and with his bundle on his back, walked to the railroad
station, a distance of seven miles.

"I want a ticket," said he to the man at the little glass window.

"Where to?"

"To--to--well, to Chicago."

The man looked suspiciously at Rupert, and then turned to a card hanging
on the wall.

"Twenty-eight-fifty," he said.

Two of the gold pieces were shoved under the glass, and Rupert received
his ticket and his change.

In the car, he secured a seat near the window that he might see the
country. It was the same familiar mountains and streams all that day,
but the next morning when he awoke and looked out of the car windows, a
strange sight met his gaze. In every direction, as far as he could see,
stretched the level prairie, over which the train sped in straight lines
for miles and miles. "We must be in Kansas," he thought. "What a sight,
to see so much level land."

But what was he going to do in Chicago? To see the world, to mingle in
the crowd, to jostle with his fellow-beings--what else, he did not know.

Chicago! What a sight to the man