t 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 able to be up, she had seen cowboys, but they had lacked the
dash and the picturesque costuming of the West she knew. They were
mostly commonplace young men, jogging past the house on horseback, or
loitering down by the corrals. They had offered absolutely no interest
or "colour" to the place, and the owner's son, Bob Warfield, had driven
her over to the Quirt in a Ford and had seemed exactly like any other
big, good-looking y