Sheila was remembering vividly; Sylvester had come into her compartment.  She could see the rolling Nebraskan country slipping by the window of the train.  She could see his sallow fingers folding the paper so that she could conveniently read a paragraph.  She remembered his gentle, pensive speech.  “Ain’t it funny, though, those things happen in the slums and they happen in the smart set, but they don’t happen near so often to just middling folks like you and me!  Don’t it sound like a Tenderloin tale, though, South American wife and American husband and her getting jealous and up and shooting him?  Money sure makes love popular.  Now, if it had been poor folks, why, they’d have hardly missed a day’s work, but just because these Hilliards have got spondulix they’ll run a paragraph about ’em in the papers for a month.”—­Sheila began to make comparisons:  a South American wife and an American husband, and here, this young man with the Spanish-American name and the Spanish-Saxon physique, and a voice that showed training and faltered over the pronouncing of the “Hilliard” as though he expected it to be too well remembered.  Had there been some mention in the paper of a son?—­a son in the West?—­a son under a cloud of some sort?  But—­she checked her spinning of romance—­this youth was too genuine a cowboy, the way he rode, the way he moved, held himself, his phrases, his turn of speech!  With all that wealth behind him how had he been allowed to grow up like this?  No, her notion was unreasonable, almost impossible.  Although dismissed, it hung about her mental presentment of him, however, like a rather baleful aura, not without fascination to a seventeen-year-old imagination.  So busy was she with her fabrications that several miles of road slipped by unnoticed.  There came a strange confusion in her thoughts.  It seemed to her that she was arguing the Hilliard case with some one.  Then with a horrible start she saw that the face of her opponent was Sylvester’s and she pushed it violently away....

“Don’t you go to sleep,” said Hilliard softly, laughing a little.  “You might fall off.”

“I—­I was asleep,” Sheila confessed, in confusion at discovering that her head had dropped against him.  “How dark it’s getting!  We’re in the valley, aren’t we?”

“Yes, ma’am, we’re most there.”  He hesitated.  “Miss Arundel, I think I’d best let you get down just before we get to Rusty.”

“Get down?  Why?”

He cleared his throat, half-turning to her.  In the dusky twilight, that was now very nearly darkness, his face was troubled and ashamed, like the face of a boy who tries to make little of a scrape.  “Well, ma’am, yesterday, the folks in Rusty kind of lost their heads.  They had a bad case of Sherlock Holmes.  I bought a horse up the valley from a chap who was all-fired anxious to sell him, and before I knew it I was playing the title part in a man-hunt.  It seems that I was riding one of a string this chap