He wore the suit of gray corduroy it was his habit to wear in open country, with leggings of russet leather, and he traveled very swiftly, with a long, easy stride, though never rapidly enough to wholly escape the dust he disturbed.  Once he stopped and bent to fasten a loose strap, and then he took off his coat, which he folded to carry.  The pall of dust enveloped him.  In it his actions gathered mystery, and his big frame loomed indistinctly like the figure of a genii in a column of smoke.  The fancy must have occurred to the watcher on the platform, for it was then the sparkles broke in her eyes, and she said aloud, softly clapping her hands:  “I wish—­I wish it to be Nip and Tuck.”

“So do I.”  She started and turned, and the station master smiled.  “They’re beauties, you can take my word.  It would be the drive of your life.”

He carried his office chair around the corner of the building to place for her in the shade.  Then his instrument called him, and for an interval she was left alone.  The desert stretched before her, limitless, in the glare of the afternoon sun.  If the Columbia flowed in that neighborhood, it was hidden by sand dunes and decomposing cliffs of granite.  There was no glimpse of water anywhere, not a green blade; even the bunch grass, that grew sparsely between the sage-brush through the draw, was dry and gray.  For a while no sound but the click of the telegraph disturbed the great silence, then a hot wind came wailing out of the solitudes and passed into a fastness of the mountains.

Finally the station master returned.  “Well,” he said genially, “how are you making it?  Lonesome, I guess.”

“Oh,” she exclaimed, “how can you, how could any human being, live in this dead, worn-out world?”

“It is desolate now,” he admitted, sending a thoughtful glance over the arid waste; “it must seem like the Great Sahara to you, coming into it for the first time and directly from the Puget Sound country.  I remember how I felt when I struck the Hesperides.  Why, it looked like the front door of Hades to me; I said so, and I called myself all kinds of a fool.  But I had sunk an even thousand dollars in a twenty-acre tract; bought it off a real estate map over in Seattle, without seeing the ground.”  He laughed, half in embarrassment at the confession, and moved to take a more comfortable position against the wall.  “I was in a railroad office in Chicago,” he explained, “and my father expected me to work up to the responsible position he held with the company and take it when he was through.  But the western fever caught me; I wanted to come to Washington and grow with the country.  He couldn’t talk me out of it; so he gave me that thousand dollars and told me to go and to stay till I made good.”

“Oh,” she cried, “how hard!  How miserable!  And you?”