save her life."

"Oh, Mr. Ridgway isn't the man to let a little thing like a war a
outrance stand in the way of his social duties, especially when those
duties happen to be inclinations, too. I understand he DID call the
evening of their arrival here."

"He didn't!" screamed Mrs. Mott, who happened to possess a voice of the
normal national register. "And what did Mr. Harley say?"

"Ah, that's what one would like to know. My informant deponeth not
beyond the fact unadorned. One may guess there must have been
undercurrents of embarrassment almost as pronounced as if the President
were to invite his Ananias Club to a pink tea. I can imagine Mr. Harley
saying: 'Try this cake, Mr. Ridgway; it isn't poisoned;' and Mr.
Ridgway answering: 'Thanks! After you, my dear Gaston."'

Miss Balfour's anxiety to meet the young woman her fiance had rescued
from the blizzard was not unnatural. Her curiosity was tinged with
frank envy, though jealousy did not enter into it at all. Virginia had
come West explicitly to take the country as she found it, and she had
found it, unfortunately, no more hazardous than little old New York,
though certainly a good deal more diverting to a young woman with
democratic proclivities that still survived the energetic weeding her
training had subjected them to.

She did not quite know what she had expected to find in Mesa. Certainly
she knew that Indians were no longer on the map, and cowboys were
kicking up their last dust before vanishing, but she had supposed that
they had left compensations in their wake. On the principle that
adventures are to the adventurous, her life should have been a whirl of
hairbreadth escapes.

But what happened? She took all sorts of chances without anything
coming of it. Her pirate fiance was the nearest approach to an
adventure she had flushed, and this pink-and-white chit of a married
schoolgirl had borrowed him for the most splendid bit of excitement
that would happen in a hundred years. She had been spinning around the
country in motor-cars for months without the sign of a blizzard, but
the chit had hit one the first time. It wasn't fair. That was her
blizzard by rights. In spirit, at least, she had "spoken for it," as
she and her brother used to say when they were children of some coveted
treasure not yet available. Virginia was quite sure that if she had
seen Waring Ridgway at the inspired moment when he was plowing through
the drifts with Mrs. Harley in his arms