She gave him a swift side-glance and looked off in the direction of the hidden Columbia.  “Sometimes—­but I haven’t a riding habit.”

Tisdale waited.  The humor deepened a little at the corners of his mouth.  There was but one passenger train each way daily on the newly opened Milwaukee road, and plainly she could not remain at this siding alone all night; yet she was debating the propriety of riding through the mountains to Wenatchee with him.  Then unexpectedly the click of a telegraph cut the stillness, and a sudden brightness leaped in her face.  “A station master,” she cried; “perhaps there’s a telephone.”  And she hurried up the platform to the open office door.

Tisdale slowly followed.

The station master, having transmitted his message, swung around on his stool, and got to his feet in astonishment on seeing the girl.

“I have made a mistake,” she said, with a wavering glance over the interior, “and I tho—­ought, I hoped there was a telephone.  But you can communicate with the nearest garage for me, can you not?  Or a stable—­or—­ somewhere.  You see,” and for an instant the coquetry of a pretty woman who knows she is pretty beamed in her eyes, “I really must have a taxicab or some kind of a carriage to take me back to Ellensburg.”

The station master, who was a very young man, answered her smile and, reaching to take a coat from a peg on the wall, hastily slipped it on.  “Of course I could call up Ellensburg,” he said; “that’s the nearest for a machine.  But it belongs to the doctor, and even if he was in town and could spare it, it would take till dark to bring it down.  It’s a mean road over sandhills for thirty-five miles.”

“It is hardly farther than that to Wenatchee,” said Tisdale quietly.  “With good saddle-horses we should be able to make it as soon.  Do you know anything about the trail through to tap the Ellensburg-Wenatchee highway?”

The station master came around the end of his desk.  “So you are going to Wenatchee,” he exclaimed, and his face shone with a sort of inner glow.  “I guess then you must have heard about Hesperides Vale; the air’s full of it, and while land is selling next to nothing you want to get in on the ground floor.  Yes, sir,” his voice quickened, “I own property over there, and I came that way, up the mountain road, in the spring to take this position when the Milwaukee opened.  But I don’t know much about your cut-off; I just kept on to Ellensburg and dropped down by train from there.  The main road, though, was in pretty good shape.  It’s the old stage road that used to connect with the Northern Pacific, and they had to do some mighty heavy hauling over it while the mountain division of the Great Northern was building up the Wenatchee.  It keeps an easy grade, following the canyons up and up till it’s six thousand feet at the divide, then you begin to drop to the Columbia.  And when you leave the woods, it’s like this again, bunch grass and sage, sand and alkali, for twenty miles.  Of course there isn’t a regular stage now; you have to hire.”