m the mother patted off
to slumber again.

Jerry walked to the rear door and looked out at the narrow space walled
in by palisades, and at glimpses of sand waves on either side of the
road beyond them; at the little hot-looking green shrubs clinging for
life to their shifting depths, and the heat-quivering air visible above
them. In all her life she had never felt so uncomfortable as now; never
realized what it means to _endure_ physical misery. She had seen the
habitable globe features--lake-shore, and seaside, and mountain resorts;
big navigable rivers; big forests; narrow little valleys; sheer cliffs
and wonderful waterfalls. She didn't know that the world held such a
place as this that anybody but a Hottentot was supposed to inhabit.
Through a long hour and a half the train was held back by the sand of
what Jerry heard was a "blowout." She did not know nor care what the
term meant. _She wanted to get_ out of it and go on, and what Jerry
Swaim _wanted_ she had always had the right to have.

The sun was getting low in the west when the local freight labored up
the Sage Brush Valley to its terminal in the yards at New Eden. All of
the passengers except Jerry tumbled out, much as tired boys rush from
the church door after a long doctrinal sermon. The car was stopped at
the freight-station, some distance down the line from the
passenger-station, which was itself a long way out from New Eden, after
the manner of Western small towns. The middle '80's, when railroad
branch lines were building, found road directors and town councils
falling out over technicalities, with the result that the railroad
seldom secured the ground it wanted and the town was seldom given a
convenient station site.

The buses filled rapidly, and the mail and express wagons were rattling
off ahead of buses and foot passengers, and still the young stranger sat
in the car. A sudden sense of loneliness had enveloped her like a cloud.
She was not a novice abroad. She had gone to strange towns alone before.
She knew all the regulations of hotel service. She knew why she had come
here and what she had to do, and she had abundant means for all her
needs. But with all these points in her favor a helplessness swept over
her, and the "what next" for the moment perplexed her. The engine was
getting restless again. However long it may require a local freight to
get from one given point to another, the engine, like an ill-broken
colt, will keep stepping up or p