The train had left Lake Keechelus and was racing easily down the banks of the Yakima.  He was entering the country he had desired to see, and soon his interest wakened.  He seated himself to watch the heights that seemed to move in quick succession like the endlessly closing gates of the Pass.  The track still ran shelf-wise along precipitous knobs and ridges; sometimes it bored through.  The forests of fir and hemlock were replaced by thinning groves of pine; then appeared the first bare, sage-mottled dune.  The trucks rumbled over a bit of trestle, and for an instant he saw the intake of an irrigating canal, and finally, after a last tunnel, the eastbound steamed out of the canyon into a broad, mountain-locked plateau.  Everywhere, watered by the brimming ditch, stretched fields of vivid alfalfa or ripe grain.  Where the harvesting was over, herds of fine horses and cattle or great flocks of sheep were turned in to browse on the stubble.  At rare intervals a sage-grown breadth of unreclaimed land, like a ragged blemish, divided these farms.  Then, when the arid slopes began to crowd again, the train whistled Ellensburg on the lower rim of the plain.

Tisdale left his seat to lean over the railing and look ahead.  He was in time to catch a fleeting glimpse of Jimmie Daniels as he hurried out of the telegraph office and sprang on the step of a starting bus.  It was here the young newspaper man was to transfer to the Northern Pacific, and doubtless the girl too was changing trains.  The Milwaukee, beyond Ellensburg, passed through new, unbroken country for many miles; the stations were all in embryo, and even though she may not have resumed her journey at the Pass with the intention of stopping off at the fair, the same bus was probably taking her over to the old, main traveled route down the Yakima to the Columbia.

Again that unaccountable depression came over him.  He tried to throw it off, laughing at himself a little and lighting a cigar.  This pretty woman had happened in his path like a flower; she had pleased his eyes for a few hours and was gone.  But what possible difference could her coming and going make to him?

The train started, and he settled back in his seat.  The fertile fields were left behind, then presently the eastbound steamed through a gap in a sun-baked ridge and entered a great arid level.  Sage-brush stretched limitless, and the dull green of each bush, powdered with dust, made a grayer blotch on the pale shifting soil, that every chance zephyr lifted in swirls and scattered like ashes.  Sometimes a whiter patch showed where alkali streaked through.  It was like coming into an old, worn-out world.  The sun burned pitilessly, and when finally the train had crossed this plain and began to wind through lofty dunes, the heat pent between the slopes became stifling.  The rear platform was growing intolerable, and he knew his station could not be far off.  He rose to go in, but the eastbound suddenly plunged into the coolness of a tunnel, and he waited while it bored through to daylight and moved on along a shelf overlooking a dry run.  Then, as he turned to the open door, he saw the girl had not taken the Northern Pacific at Ellensburg.  She was still there in the observation car.