The “High Line Flyer,” as this train was derisively called among railroad men, was jerking along through the hot afternoon over the monotonous country between Holdredge and Cheyenne.  Besides the blond man and himself the only occupants of the car were two dusty, bedraggled-looking girls who had been to the Exposition at Chicago, and who were earnestly discussing the cost of their first trip out of Colorado.  The four uncomfortable passengers were covered with a sediment of fine, yellow dust which clung to their hair and eyebrows like gold powder.  It blew up in clouds from the bleak, lifeless country through which they passed, until they were one colour with the sage-brush and sand-hills.  The grey and yellow desert was varied only by occasional ruins of deserted towns, and the little red boxes of station-houses, where the spindling trees and sickly vines in the blue-grass yards made little green reserves fenced off in that confusing wilderness of sand.

As the slanting rays of the sun beat in stronger and stronger through the car-windows, the blond gentleman asked the ladies’ permission to remove his coat, and sat in his lavender striped shirtsleeves, with a black silk handkerchief tucked about his collar.  He had seemed interested in Everett since they had boarded the train at Holdredge; kept glancing at him curiously and then looking reflectively out of the window, as though he were trying to recall something.  But wherever Everett went, some one was almost sure to look at him with that curious interest, and it had ceased to embarrass or annoy him.  Presently the stranger, seeming satisfied with his observation, leaned back in his seat, half closed his eyes, and began softly to whistle the Spring Song from Proserpine, the cantata that a dozen years before had made its young composer famous in a night.  Everett had heard that air on guitars in Old Mexico, on mandolins at college glees, on cottage organs in New England hamlets, and only two weeks ago he had heard it played on sleigh-bells at a variety theatre in Denver.  There was literally no way of escaping his brother’s precocity.  Adriance could live on the other side of the Atlantic, where his youthful indiscretions were forgotten in his mature achievements, but his brother had never been able to outrun Proserpine,—­and here he found it again, in the Colorado sand-hills.  Not that Everett was exactly ashamed of Proserpine; only a man of genius could have written it, but it was the sort of thing that a man of genius outgrows as soon as he can.

Everett unbent a trifle, and smiled at his neighbour across the aisle.  Immediately the large man rose and coming over dropped into the seat facing Hilgarde, extending his card.

“Dusty ride, isn’t it?  I don’t mind it myself; I’m used to it.  Born and bred in de briar patch, like Br’er Rabbit.  I’ve been trying to place you for a long time; I think I must have met you before.”

“Thank you,” said Everett, taking the card; “my name is Hilgarde.  You’ve probably met my brother, Adriance; people often mistake me for him.”