ll think we are sorry she has come. Please go over into
the town and buy yourself some tobacco or something to cheer you. I'll
get on Tricks and ride up and down near the track for a while, and then
we will both be in a better humor when the train finally does get in."

Miss Ruth Drew sighed. She was sitting in the Pullman car with her eyes
closed and an expression of supreme fatigue on her sallow but not
unattractive face.

It seemed to her that she had been traveling ever since she could
remember. Were there people in the world idiotic enough to think there
was beauty in the western prairies? For days she had looked out on bare
stretches of endless brown plains rising and falling in one monotonous
chain. The sand was in her eyes, in her ears, in her mouth; worst of
all, it had piled up in a great mass of homesickness on her heart.

How could she have turned her back on dear New England villages, with
their sleepy, green and white homesteads and trim gardens, for this vast
desert? "Of course, she was doing her duty in coming to look after four
motherless girls," Ruth remembered, with a pang, but her duty at the
present moment did not appear cheerful.

When the conductor announced that the next station was hers, Ruth sat up
and arranged her hat and veil neatly. She adjusted her glasses on her
thin nose and put back the single lock of hair that had strayed from its
place. Her heart began to flutter a little faster. Was she actually
arriving in the neighborhood of Rainbow Ranch? It didn't seem possible!

If you can imagine a very prim, grey mouse kind of girl, who looked a
good deal older than she was, with ash brown hair and eyes and a neat
tailor-made suit to match, you will get a very good impression of Miss
Ruth Drew. Her figure was very good and her mouth might have been
pretty, except that it looked as though she disapproved of a great many
things, and that is never becoming. But she was tired and homesick and
it was not a fair time to judge her.

It would be another fifteen minutes before she would get into Wolfville,
and Ruth closed her eyes again. There was nothing to see out of her
window that was in the least interesting and she preferred to think
about the ranch girls. She wondered if they would be very hard to get on
with, if they were very wild and reckless. It made her shudder: the idea
of her cousin's children growing up with only a common cowboy for their
friend and adviser.

There was a little sti