her business, only "M. Sinclair."

Cold Springs, where Sinclair had first brought her when he had
headquarters there as foreman of bridges, had proved a hopeless place
for the millinery business--at least, in the way that Marion ran it.
The women that had husbands had no money to buy hats with, and the
women without husbands wore gaudy headgear, and were of the kind that
made Marion's heart creep when they opened the shop door. What was
worse, they were inclined to joke with her, as if there must be a
community of interest between a deserted woman and women who had
deserted womanhood. To this business Marion would not cater, and in
consequence her millinery affairs sometimes approached collapse. She
could, however, cook extraordinarily well, and, with the aid of a
servant-maid, could always provide for a boarder or two--perhaps a
railroad man or a mine superintendent to whom she could serve meals,
and who, like all mountain men, were more than generous in their
accounting with women. Among these standbys of hers was McCloud.
McCloud had always been her friend, and when she left Cold Springs and
moved to Medicine Bend to set up her little shop in Boney Street near
Fort, she had lost him. Yet somehow, to compensate Marion for other
cruel things in the mountains, Providence seemed to raise up a new
friend for her wherever she went. In Medicine Bend she did not know a
soul, but almost the first customer that walked into her shop--and she
was a customer worth while--was Dicksie Dunning of the Crawling
Stone.

CHAPTER V

THE CRAWLING STONE

Where the mountain chains of North America have been flung up into a
continental divide, the country in many of its aspects is still
terrible. In extent alone this mountain empire is grandiose. The
swiftest transcontinental trains approaching its boundaries at night
find night falling again before they have fairly penetrated it.
Geologically severe, this region in geological store is the richest of
the continent; physically forbidding beyond all other stretches of
North America, the Barren Land alone excepted, in this region lie its
gentlest valleys. Here the desert is most grotesque, and here are
pastoral retreats the most secluded. It is the home of the Archean
granite, and its basins are of a fathomless dust. Under its sagebrush
wastes the skeletons of earth's hugest mammals lie beside behemoth and
the monsters of the deep. The eternal snow, the granite peak, the
sandstone