eloped him. In it his actions gathered mystery, and his big frame
loomed indistinctly like the figure of a genii in a column of smoke. The
fancy must have occurred to the watcher on the platform, for it was then
the sparkles broke in her eyes, and she said aloud, softly clapping her
hands: "I wish--I wish it to be Nip and Tuck."

"So do I." She started and turned, and the station master smiled. "They're
beauties, you can take my word. It would be the drive of your life."

He carried his office chair around the corner of the building to place for
her in the shade. Then his instrument called him, and for an interval she
was left alone. The desert stretched before her, limitless, in the glare
of the afternoon sun. If the Columbia flowed in that neighborhood, it was
hidden by sand dunes and decomposing cliffs of granite. There was no
glimpse of water anywhere, not a green blade; even the bunch grass, that
grew sparsely between the sage-brush through the draw, was dry and gray.
For a while no sound but the click of the telegraph disturbed the great
silence, then a hot wind came wailing out of the solitudes and passed into
a fastness of the mountains.

Finally the station master returned. "Well," he said genially, "how are
you making it? Lonesome, I guess."

"Oh," she exclaimed, "how can you, how could any human being, live in this
dead, worn-out world?"

"It is desolate now," he admitted, sending a thoughtful glance over the
arid waste; "it must seem like the Great Sahara to you, coming into it for
the first time and directly from the Puget Sound country. I remember how I
felt when I struck the Hesperides. Why, it looked like the front door of
Hades to me; I said so, and I called myself all kinds of a fool. But I had
sunk an even thousand dollars in a twenty-acre tract; bought it off a real
estate map over in Seattle, without seeing the ground." He laughed, half
in embarrassment at the confession, and moved to take a more comfortable
position against the wall. "I was in a railroad office in Chicago," he
explained, "and my father expected me to work up to the responsible
position he held with the company and take it when he was through. But the
western fever caught me; I wanted to come to Washington and grow with the
country. He couldn't talk me out of it; so he gave me that thousand
dollars and told me to go and to stay till I made good."

"Oh," she cried, "how hard! How miserable! And you?"

"Why, I stayed. There wasn