wiftly. Here the road forked, a rough,
little-used trail keeping on up the creek, the better travelled road
crossing and climbing the farther bank. Lorraine scarcely hesitated
before she chose the main trail which crossed the creek.

From the creek the trail she followed kept climbing until Lorraine
wondered if there would ever be a top. The wind whipped her narrow
skirts and impeded her, tugged at her hat, tingled her nose and watered
her eyes. But she kept on doggedly, disgustedly, the West, which she
had seen through the glamour of swift-blooded Romance, sinking lower
and lower in her estimation. Nothing but jack rabbits and little,
twittery birds moved through the sage, though she watched hungrily for
horsemen.

Quite suddenly the gray landscape glowed with a palpitating radiance,
unreal, beautiful beyond expression. She stopped, turned to face the
west and stared awestruck at one of those flaming sunsets which makes
the desert land seem but a gateway into the ineffable glory beyond the
earth. That the high-piled, gorgeous cloud-bank presaged a
thunderstorm she never guessed; and that a thunderstorm may be a
deadly, terrifying peril she never had quite believed. Her mother had
told of people being struck by lightning, but Lorraine could not
associate lightning with death, especially in the West, where men
usually died by shooting, lynching, or by pitching over a cliff.

The wind hushed as suddenly as it had whooped. Warned by the twinkling
lights far behind her--lights which must be the small part at last
visible of Echo, Idaho--Lorraine went on. She had been walking
steadily for four hours, and she must surely have come nearly twenty
miles. If she ever reached the top of the hill, she believed that she
would see her father's ranch just beyond.

The afterglow had deepened to dusk when she came at last to the highest
point of that long grade. Far ahead loomed a cluster of square, black
objects which must be the ranch buildings of the Quirt, and Lorraine's
spirits lightened a little. What a surprise her father and all his
cowboys would have when she walked in upon them! It was almost worth
the walk, she told herself hearteningly. She hoped that dad had a good
cook. He would wear a flour-sack apron, naturally, and would be tall
and lean, or else very fat. He would be a comedy character, but she
hoped he would not be the grouchy kind, which, though very funny when
he rampages around on the screen, m