g that
interested her; he was the boastful, strutting adventurer, not genuinely
Western, and he affected long hair and guns and notoriety. Helen had
suspected the veracity of the many fights he claimed had been his,
and also she suspected that he was not really big enough to be bad--as
Western men were bad. But on the train, in the station at La Junta, one
glimpse of him, manifestly spying upon her while trying to keep out of
her sight, warned Helen that she now might have a problem on her hands.

The recognition sobered her. All was not to be a road of roses to this
new home in the West. Riggs would follow her, if he could not accompany
her, and to gain his own ends he would stoop to anything. Helen felt the
startling realization of being cast upon her own resources, and then
a numbing discouragement and loneliness and helplessness. But these
feelings did not long persist in the quick pride and flash of her
temper. Opportunity knocked at her door and she meant to be at home to
it. She would not have been Al Auchincloss's niece if she had faltered.
And, when temper was succeeded by genuine anger, she could have laughed
to scorn this Harve Riggs and his schemes, whatever they were. Once
and for all she dismissed fear of him. When she left St. Joseph she had
faced the West with a beating heart and a high resolve to be worthy of
that West. Homes had to be made out there in that far country, so Uncle
Al had written, and women were needed to make homes. She meant to be one
of these women and to make of her sister another. And with the thought
that she would know definitely what to say to Riggs when he approached
her, sooner or later, Helen dismissed him from mind.

While the train was in motion, enabling Helen to watch the ever-changing
scenery, and resting her from the strenuous task of keeping Bo well in
hand at stations, she lapsed again into dreamy gaze at the pine forests
and the red, rocky gullies and the dim, bold mountains. She saw the sun
set over distant ranges of New Mexico--a golden blaze of glory, as new
to her as the strange fancies born in her, thrilling and fleeting by.
Bo's raptures were not silent, and the instant the sun sank and the
color faded she just as rapturously importuned Helen to get out the huge
basket of food they had brought from home.

They had two seats, facing each other, at the end of the coach, and
piled there, with the basket on top, was luggage that constituted all
the girls owned in t