“My dear! my dear!”—­a head in crimpers was thrust from between the curtains of the section opposite—­“I’ve been awake half the night.  I was so afraid I wouldn’t see you before you got off.”

The head was followed, almost instinctively, by a hand travelling furtively to the crimpers that gripped the lady’s brow like barnacles clinging to a keel.

Mary expressed a grieved appreciation at the loss of rest in behalf of her early departure, and conspicuously forbore to glance in the direction of the barnacles, that being a first principle as between woman and woman.

“And, oh, my dear, it gets worse and worse.  I’ve looked at it this morning, and it’s worse in Wyoming than it was in Colorado.  What it ’ll be before I reach California, I shudder to think.”

“It’s bound to improve,” suggested Mary, with the easy optimism of one who was leaving it.  “It couldn’t be any worse than this, could it?”

The neuter pronoun, it might be well to state, signified the prairie; its melancholy personality having penetrated the very marrow of their train existence, they had come to refer to it by the monosyllable, as in certain nether circles the head of the house receives his superlative distinction in “He.”

Again the locomotive shrieked, again the girl mechanically clutched the suit-case, as presenting the most difficult item in the problem of transportation, and this time the shriek was not an idle formality.  The train slowed down; the uneasy sleepers behind the green-striped curtains stirred restlessly with the lessening motion of their uncouth cradle.  The porter came to help her, with the chastened mien of one whose hopes of largess are small, the lady with the barnacles called after her redundant farewells, and a moment later Miss Carmichael was standing on the station platform looking helplessly after the train that toiled and puffed, yet seemed, in that crystalline atmosphere, still within arm’s-reach.  She watched it till its floating pennant of smoke was nothing but a gray feather blowing farther and farther out of sight on the flat prairie.

The town—­it would be unkind to mention its name—­had made merry the night before at the comprehensive invitation of a sheepman who had just disposed of his wool-clip, and who said, by way of general summons, “What’s the use of temptin’ the bank?” “Town,” therefore, when Mary Carmichael first made its acquaintance, was still sleeping the sleep of the unjust.  Those among last night’s roisterers who had had to make an early start for their camps were well into the foot-hills by this time, and would remember with exhilaration the cracked tinkle of the dance-hall piano as inspiring music when the lonesomeness of the desert menaced and the young blood again clamored for its own.