. There came
a note from him, then a telegram. She did not read them. Tuesday found
her on a train bound for Colorado. She remembered little of the first
half of her journey. She had brought with her books and magazines, and
she must have read hem, but her mind had evidently retained nothing of
what she had read. She must have spent hours looking out of the window,
for she remembered, long afterward, the endlessness and the monotony of
the Kansas prairies. They soothed her. She was glad there were no bits
of autumnal woodland, no tantalizing vistas, nothing to break the flat
and boundless immensity of it. Here was something big, and bountiful,
and real, and primal. Good Kansas dirt. Miles of it. Miles of it. She
felt she would like to get out and tramp on it, hard.

"Pretty cold up there in Estes Park," the conductor had said. "Been
snowing up in the mountains."

She had arranged to stop in Denver only long enough to change trains.
A puffy little branch line was to take her from Denver to Loveland, and
there, she had been told, one of the big mountain-road steam automobiles
would take her up the mountains to her destination. For one as mentally
alert as she normally was, the exact location of that destination was
very hazy in her mind. Heyl's place. That was all. Ordinarily she would
have found the thought ridiculous. But she concentrated on it now; clung
to it.

At the first glimpse of the foot-hills Fanny's listless gaze became
interested. If you have ever traveled on the jerky, cleanly, meandering
little road that runs between Denver and the Park you know that it
winds, and curves, so that the mountains seem to leap about, friskily,
first confronting you on one side of the car window, then disappearing
and seeming to taunt you from the windows of the opposite side. Fanny
laughed aloud. The mountain steam-car was waiting at Loveland. There
were few passengers at this time of year. The driver was a great tanned
giant, pongee colored from his hair to his puttees and boots. Fanny was
to learn, later, that in Estes Park the male tourist was likely to
be puny, pallid, and unattractive when compared to the tall, slim,
straight, khaki-clad youth, browned by the sun, and the wind, and the
dust, who drives his steamer up and down the perilous mountain roads
with more dexterity than the charioteering gods ever displayed on
Olympus.

Fanny got the seat beside this glorious person. The steamer was a huge
vehicle, boasting fi