“What’s up?” asked Wade.

“Hot-box on the diner; see it?”

“Yes, and smell it.  Let’s go down.”

But Craig shook his head lazily, and Wade, cinching his loosened belt, limped with aching legs down the slope.  The trainmen were already pulling the smouldering, evil-smelling waste from the box, and after watching a minute he loitered along the track beside the car.  Several of the shades were raised and the sight of the gleaming white napery and silver brought a wistful gleam to his eyes.  But there was worse to come.  At the last table a belated diner was still eating.  He was a large man with a double chin, under which he had tucked a corner of his napkin.  He ate leisurely, but with gusto.

“Hot roast beef,” groaned Wade, “and asparagus and little green beans!  Oh Lord!”

He suddenly felt very empty, and mechanically tightened his leather belt another inch.  It came over him all at once that he was frightfully hungry.  For the last two days he and his partner had been travelling on short rations, and to-day they had been on the go since before sun-up.  For a moment the wild idea came to him of jumping on the train and riding down to Aroya just so he could take a seat in the dining-car and eat his fill.

“They wouldn’t make much out of me at a dollar a throw,” he reflected, with a grin.  But it wouldn’t be fair to Craig, and he abandoned the idea in the next breath.  He couldn’t stand there any longer, though, and see that man eat.  He addressed himself to the closed window before he turned away.

“I hope it chokes you,” he muttered, venomously.

Some of the passengers had descended from the day coach to stretch their limbs, and with a desire to avoid them Wade walked toward the rear of the train.  Daylight dies hard up here in the mountains, but at last twilight held the world, a clear, starlit twilight.  Overhead the vault of heaven was hung with deep blue velvet, pricked out with a million diamonds.  Up the slope the camp-fire glowed ruddily.  In the west the smouldering sunset embers had cooled to ashes of dove-gray and steel, against which Sierra Blanca crouched, a grim, black giant.  Wade had reached the observation platform at the end of the sleeping-car.  With a tired sigh he turned toward the slope and the beckoning fire.  But the sound of a closing door brought his head around and the fire no longer beckoned.

On the platform, one hand on the knob of the car door as though meditating retreat, stood the straight, slim figure of a girl.  She wore a light skirt and a white waist, and a bunch of flowers drooped from her breast.  Her head was uncovered and the soft brown hair waved lustrously away from a face of ivory.  The eyes that looked down into his reflected the stars in their depths, the gently-parted mouth was like a vivid red rosebud in the dusk.  To Wade she seemed the very Spirit of Twilight, white and slim and ethereal, and so suddenly had the apparition sprung into his vision that he was startled and bewildered.  For a long moment their looks held.  Then, somewhat faintly,