he car steps to the platform of the place called Echo, Idaho.
I can only guess at what she expected to find there in the person of a
cattle-king father, but whatever it was she did not find it. No
father, of any type whatever, came forward to claim her. In spite of
her "Western" experience she looked about her for a taxi, or at least a
streetcar. Even in the wilds of Western melodrama one could hear the
clang of street-car gongs warning careless autoists off the track.

After the train had hooted and gone on around an absolutely
uninteresting low hill of yellow barrenness dotted with stunted sage,
it was the silence that first impressed Lorraine disagreeably. Echo,
Idaho, was a very poor imitation of all the Western sets she had ever
seen. True, it had the straggling row of square-fronted, one-story
buildings, with hitch rails, but the signs painted across the fronts
were absolutely common. Any director she had ever obeyed would have
sent for his assistant director and would have used language which a
lady must not listen to. Behind the store and the post-office and the
blacksmith shop, on the brow of the low hill around whose point the
train had disappeared, were houses with bay windows and porches
absolutely out of keeping with the West. So far as Lorraine could see,
there was not a log cabin in the whole place.

The hitch rails were empty, and there was not a cowboy in sight.
Before the post-office a terribly grimy touring car stood with its
running-boards loaded with canvas-covered suitcases. Three goggled,
sunburned women in ugly khaki suits were disconsolately drinking soda
water from bottles without straws, and a goggled, red-faced,
angry-looking man was jerking impatiently at the hood of the machine.
Lorraine and her suitcase apparently excited no interest whatever in
Echo, Idaho.

The station agent was carrying two boxes of oranges and a crate of
California cabbages in out of the sun, and a limp individual in blue
gingham shirt and dirty overalls had shouldered the mail sack and was
making his way across the dusty, rut-scored street to the post-office.

Two questions and two brief answers convinced her that the station
agent did not know Britton Hunter,--which was strange, unless this
happened to be a very new agent. Lorraine left him to his cabbages and
followed the man with the mail sack.

At the post-office the anaemic clerk came forward, eyeing her with
admiring curiosity. Lorraine had seen