dson and the
brightest stars in all the world shone out from a black-blue firmament
unmarred by the smallest haze.

Till Split discovered it.

To Split, who had never traveled by any means other than her own lithe
limbs and Jack Cody's sled, the coach's big, low, dusty body, its heavy
high wheels, its dusky interior smelling of heated leather and
twig-scented, summer-sunned country dust, were romance incarnate. It
meant voyaging to her, this coach: strange sights, queer peoples, the
sea that she had never seen, the rippling of rivers she had never heard,
the smell of pasture-land, of pine forests, of lake-dipped willows, of
flowers--valleys full of flowers, like those that bloomed in Mrs.
Pemberton's garden, but unlike those enchanted blossoms in not being
irrevocably attached to the bush on which they grew, and unguarded by
any Mrs. Ramrod, whose most gracious act was to hold up a rose on its
stalk between forefinger and thumb and permit a flower-hungry girl to
bend down and sniff it. On the same principle, Mrs. Ramrod _showed_ her
preserves, but she never bestowed a rose "for keeps," nor did it ever
seem to occur to her that one might want a taste of that which made her
glass jars so temptingly beautiful.

Split "took a dare" the first time she mounted Baldy Bob's coach. She
climbed up to the driver's high seat in front with as much hidden
trepidation but as unhesitatingly as she would have plunged down a
shaft, to show Sissy, who was a coward, how brave her sister was.

But after she got up there, Sissy faded out of the world. In Baldy Bob's
coach Split was seized with _Wanderlust_. She sat erect and still up
there in front, her hands clasped in her lap, her shining eyes averted
from the motionless tongue below and fixed on the unrolling landscapes
of the world; on plains and valleys, on villages nestling in trees and
flying past, on great rolling fields of grain--perhaps a smooth, light,
continuous sort of sage-brush, wrinkling in the wind as the sunflowers
seem to when one looks up at the mountain from the sluice-box.

Yet with the advent of Frances into this strange game of rapt silences
there came a change. Frank's imagination did not tempt her abroad
strange countries for to see; she merely wanted to ride down and off the
platform.

"Make it go, Split," she begged, with a trust in her big sister's
capacity that Split would have perished rather than admit to be
unfounded.

"Will you hold on tight?" she a