ing
to do?"

He glanced at her. Her attitude and the troubled expression of her face
as well as her voice indicated that the logic of the situation was
overthrowing the jaunty self-possession which she had at first affected.
The desert was staring her out of countenance. How his heart yearned
toward her! If she had only given him a right to take care of her, how
he would comfort her! what prodigies would he be capable of to succor
her! But this rising impulse of tenderness was turned to choking
bitterness by the memory of that scornful "No, sir." So he replied,
coldly, "I'm not in the habit of being left behind in deserts, and I
don't know what is customary to do in such cases. I see nothing except
to wait for the next train, which will come along some time within
twenty-four hours."

There was another long silence, after which she said in a timid voice,
"Hadn't we better walk to the next station?"

At the suggestion of walking he glanced at her close-fitting dress, and
a sardonic grin slightly twitched the corners of his mouth as he dryly
answered, "It is thirty miles one way and twenty the other to the first
station."

Several minutes passed before she spoke again, and then she said, with
an accent almost like that of a child in trouble and about to cry, "I'm
cold."

The strong, unceasing wind, blowing from snowy mountain-caverns across a
plain on which there was not the slightest barrier of hill or tree to
check its violence, was indeed bitterly cold, and Lombard himself felt
chilled to the marrow of his bones. He took off his overcoat and offered
it to her.

"No," said she, "you are as cold as I am."

"You will please take it," he replied in a peremptory manner; and she
took it.

"At this rate we shall freeze to death before midnight," he added as if
in soliloquy. "I must see if I can't contrive to make some sort of a
shelter with this sagebrush."

He began by tearing up a large number of bushes by the roots. Seeing
what he was doing, Miss Dwyer was glad to warm her stiffened muscles by
taking hold and helping; which she did with a vigor that shortly reduced
her gloves to shreds and filled her fingers with scratches from the
rough twigs. Lombard next chose an unusually high and thick clump of
brush, and cleared a small space three feet across in the centre of it,
scattering twigs on the uncovered earth to keep off its chill.

"Now, Miss Dwyer, if you will step inside this spot, I think I can build
up