what a fool!" apropos
of nothing tangible, and stared dully out at the forlorn waste of
cinders with rows of shining rails running straight across it upon ties
half sunken in the black desolation, and at the red abomination
which was the pump-house squatting beside the dripping tank, the pump
breathing asthmatically as it labored to keep the sliding water
gauge from standing at the figure which meant reproach for the grimy
attendant.

"What a fool--what a fool!" she repeated at the end of ten moody
minutes. Then she threw the novel into a corner of the room, set her
lower jaw into the square lines of stubbornness, went over to the
sleeping telegraph instrument which now and then clicked and twittered
in its sleep, called up Shoshone, and commanded the agent there to
send down a quart freezer of ice cream, a banana cake, and all the late
magazines he could find, including--especially including--the alleged
"funny" ones.

"You certainly--are--the prize--fool!" she said, when she switched
off the current, and she said it with vicious emphasis. Whereupon she
recovered the novel, seated herself determinedly in the beribboned
rocker, flipped the leaves of the book spitefully until she found one
which had a corner turned down, and read a garden-party chapter much as
she used to study her multiplication table when she was ten and hated
arithmetic.

A freight was announced over the wire, arrived with a great wheezing and
snorting, which finally settled to a rhythmic gasping of the air pump,
while a few boxes of store supplies were being dumped unceremoniously
upon the platform. Miss Georgie was freight agent as well as many other
things, and she went out and stood bareheaded in the sun to watch the
unloading.

She performed, with the unthinking precision which comes of long
practice, the many little duties pertaining to her several offices, and
when the wheels began once more to clank, and she had waved her hand
to the fireman, the brakeman, and the conductor, and had seen the dirty
flags at the rear of the swaying caboose flap out of sight around the
low, sage-covered hill, she turned rather dismally to the parlor end
of the office, and took up the book with her former air of grim
determination. So for an hour, perhaps.

"Is Miss Georgie Howard at home?" It was Evadna standing in the doorway,
her indigo eyes fixed with innocent gayety--which her mouth somehow
failed to meet halfway in mirth--upon the reader.

"She is,