intance of the
personnel of a third-rate opera company on the train to Deadwood, dined
in a camp of railroad constructors at the world's end beyond New Castle,
gone through the Black Hills on horseback, fished for trout in Dome
Lake, watched a dance at Cripple Creek, where the lost souls who hide
in the hills gathered for their besotted revelry. And now, last of all,
before the return to thraldom, there was this little shack, anchored on
the windy crest of the Divide, a little black dot against the flaming
sunsets, a scented sea of cornland bathed in opalescent air and blinding
sunlight.

Margaret Elliot was one of those women of whom there are so many in this
day, when old order, passing, giveth place to new; beautiful, talented,
critical, unsatisfied, tired of the world at twenty-four. For the moment
the life and people of the Divide interested her. She was there but a
week; perhaps had she stayed longer, that inexorable ennui which travels
faster even than the Vestibule Limited would have overtaken her. The
week she tarried there was the week that Eric Hermannson was helping
Jerry Lockhart thresh; a week earlier or a week later, and there would
have been no story to write.

It was on Thursday and they were to leave on Saturday. Wyllis and his
sister were sitting on the wide piazza of the ranchhouse, staring out
into the afternoon sunlight and protesting against the gusts of hot wind
that blew up from the sandy riverbottom twenty miles to the southward.

The young man pulled his cap lower over his eyes and remarked:

"This wind is the real thing; you don't strike it anywhere else. You
remember we had a touch of it in Algiers and I told you it came from
Kansas. It's the keynote of this country."

Wyllis touched her hand that lay on the hammock and continued gently:

"I hope it's paid you, Sis. Roughing it's dangerous business; it takes
the taste out of things."

She shut her fingers firmly over the brown hand that was so like her
own.

"Paid? Why, Wyllis, I haven't been so happy since we were children and
were going to discover the ruins of Troy together some day. Do you know,
I believe I could just stay on here forever and let the world go on its
own gait. It seems as though the tension and strain we used to talk of
last winter were gone for good, as though one could never give one's
strength out to such petty things any more."

Wyllis brushed the ashes of his pipe away from the silk handkerchief
that was k