own the banks of
the Yakima. He was entering the country he had desired to see, and soon
his interest wakened. He seated himself to watch the heights that seemed
to move in quick succession like the endlessly closing gates of the Pass.
The track still ran shelf-wise along precipitous knobs and ridges;
sometimes it bored through. The forests of fir and hemlock were replaced
by thinning groves of pine; then appeared the first bare, sage-mottled
dune. The trucks rumbled over a bit of trestle, and for an instant he saw
the intake of an irrigating canal, and finally, after a last tunnel, the
eastbound steamed out of the canyon into a broad, mountain-locked plateau.
Everywhere, watered by the brimming ditch, stretched fields of vivid
alfalfa or ripe grain. Where the harvesting was over, herds of fine horses
and cattle or great flocks of sheep were turned in to browse on the
stubble. At rare intervals a sage-grown breadth of unreclaimed land, like
a ragged blemish, divided these farms. Then, when the arid slopes began to
crowd again, the train whistled Ellensburg on the lower rim of the plain.

Tisdale left his seat to lean over the railing and look ahead. He was in
time to catch a fleeting glimpse of Jimmie Daniels as he hurried out of
the telegraph office and sprang on the step of a starting bus. It was here
the young newspaper man was to transfer to the Northern Pacific, and
doubtless the girl too was changing trains. The Milwaukee, beyond
Ellensburg, passed through new, unbroken country for many miles; the
stations were all in embryo, and even though she may not have resumed her
journey at the Pass with the intention of stopping off at the fair, the
same bus was probably taking her over to the old, main traveled route down
the Yakima to the Columbia.

Again that unaccountable depression came over him. He tried to throw it
off, laughing at himself a little and lighting a cigar. This pretty woman
had happened in his path like a flower; she had pleased his eyes for a few
hours and was gone. But what possible difference could her coming and
going make to him?

The train started, and he settled back in his seat. The fertile fields
were left behind, then presently the eastbound steamed through a gap in a
sun-baked ridge and entered a great arid level. Sage-brush stretched
limitless, and the dull green of each bush, powdered with dust, made a
grayer blotch on the pale shifting soil, that every chance zephyr lifted
in swirls and