o her rather smart travelling bag, left the suitcase in the
telegraph office and started. Not another question would she ask of
Echo, Idaho, which was flatter and more insipid than the drinking water
in the tin "cooler" in the waiting room. The station agent stood with
his hands on his hips and watched her cross the track and start down
the road, pardonably astonished to see a young woman walk down a road
that led only to the hills twenty miles away, carrying her luggage
exactly as if her trip was a matter of a block or two at most.

The bag was rather heavy and as she went on it became heavier. She
meant to carry it slung across her shoulder on a stick as soon as she
was well away from the prying eyes of Echo's inhabitants. Later, if
she felt tired, she could easily hide it behind a bush along the road
and send one of her father's cowboys after it. The road was very dusty
and carried the wind-blown traces of automobile tires. Some one would
surely overtake her and give her a ride before she walked very far.

For the first half hour she believed that she was walking on level
ground, but when she looked back there was no sign of any town behind
her. Echo had disappeared as completely as if it had been swallowed.
Even the unseemly bay-windowed houses on the hill had gone under. She
walked for another half hour and saw only the gray sage stretching all
around her. The hills looked farther away than when she started.
Still, that beaten road must lead somewhere. Two hours later she began
to wonder why this particular road should be so unending and so empty.
Never in her life before had she walked for two hours without seeming
to get anywhere, or without seeing any living human.

Both shoulders were sore from the weight of the bag on the stick, but
the sagebushes looked so exactly alike that she feared she could not
describe the particular spot where the cowboys would find her bag,
wherefore she carried it still. She was beginning to change hands very
often when the wind came.

Just where or how that wind sprang up she did not know. Suddenly it
was whooping across the sage and flinging up clouds of dust from the
road. To Lorraine, softened by years of southern California weather,
it seemed to blow straight off an ice field, it was so cold.

After an interminable time which measured three hours on her watch, she
came to an abrupt descent into a creek bed, down the middle of which
the creek itself was flowing s