ill Miss Dwyer should have retired. When the
train reached Ogden the next morning, instead of going on East he would
take the same train back to San Francisco, and that would be the end of
his romance. His engagement in New York had been a myth, and with Miss
Dwyer's "No, sir," the only business with the East that had brought him
on this trip was at an end.

About an hour after leaving the supper-station, the train suddenly
stopped in the midst of the desert. Something about the engine had
become disarranged, which it would take some time to put right. Glad
to improve an opportunity to stretch their legs, many of the passengers
left the cars and were strolling about, curiously examining the
sagebrush and the alkali, and admiring the ghostly plain as it spread,
bare, level, and white as an icebound polar sea, to the feet of the
far-off mountains.

Lombard had also left the car, and was walking about, his hands in
his overcoat pockets, trying to clear his mind of the wreckage that
obstructed its working; for Miss Dwyer's refusal had come upon him as
a sudden squall that carries away the masts and sails of a vessel and
transforms it in a moment from a gallant bounding ship to a mere hulk
drifting in an entangled mass of debris. Of course she had a perfect
right to suit herself about the kind of a man she took for a husband,
but he certainly had not thought she was such an utter coquette. If ever
a woman gave a man reason to think himself as good as engaged, she had
given him that reason, and yet she refused him as coolly as she would
have declined a second plate of soup. There must be some truth, after
all, in the rant of the poets about the heartlessness and fickleness of
women, although he had always been used to consider it the merest bosh.
Suddenly he heard the train moving. He was perhaps fifty yards off, and,
grumbling anathemas at the stupidity of the conductor, started to run
for the last car. He was not quite desperate enough to fancy being left
alone on the Nevada desert with night coming on. He would have caught
the train without difficulty, if his foot had not happened to catch in
a tough clump of sage, throwing him violently to the ground. As he
gathered himself up, the train was a hundred yards off, and moving
rapidly. To overtake it was out of the question.

"Stop! ho! stop!" he yelled at the top of his lungs. But there was no
one on the rear platform to see him, and the closed windows and the
rattle of t