he Lord. I doubt
if even Rachael is angel enough." She paused. "They're going to make
nooning, aren't they? I mustn't stay. Good-bye."

I sprang to lift her, but with gay shake of head she slipped off of
herself and landed securely.

"I can stand alone. I have to. Men are always ready to do what I don't ask
them to do, as long as I can serve as a tool or a toy. You will be very,
very careful. Good-day, sir."

She flashed just the trace of a smile; gathering her skirt she ran on,
undeterred by the teamsters applauding her spryness.

"Swing out!" shouted Jenks, from rear. "We're noonin'." The lead wagons
had halted beside the trail and all the wagons following began to imitate.

CHAPTER XIV

I TAKE A LESSON

From this hour's brief camp, early made, we should have turned southward,
to leave the railroad line and cross country for the Overland Stage trail
that skirted the southern edge of the worse desert before us. But Captain
Hyrum was of different mind. With faith in the Lord and bull confidence in
himself he had resolved to keep straight on by the teamster road which
through league after league ever extended fed supplies to the advance of
the builders.

Under its adventitious guidance we should strike the stage road at Bitter
Creek, eighty or one hundred miles; thence trundle, veering southwestward,
for the famed City of the Saints, near two hundred miles farther.

Therefore after nooning at a pool of stagnant, scummy water we hooked up
and plunged ahead, creaking and groaning and dust enveloped, constantly
outstripped by the hurrying construction trains thundering over the newly
laid rails, we ourselves the tortoise in the race.

My Lady did not join me again to-day, nor on the morrow. She abandoned me
to a sense of dissatisfaction with myself, of foreboding, and of a void
in the landscape.

Our sorely laden train went swaying and pitching across the gaunt face of
a high, broad plateau, bleak, hot, and monotonous in contour; underfoot
the reddish granite pulverized by grinding tire and hoof, over us the pale
bluish fiery sky without a cloud, distant in the south the shining tips of
a mountain range, and distant below in the west the slowly spreading vista
of a great, bared ocean-bed, simmering bizarre with reds, yellows and
deceptive whites, and ringed about by battlements jagged and rock hewn.

Into this enchanted realm we were bound; by token of the smoke blotches
the railroad line led thither.