were well into the foot-hills by this time, and would remember with
exhilaration the cracked tinkle of the dance-hall piano as inspiring music
when the lonesomeness of the desert menaced and the young blood again
clamored for its own.

"Town"—it contained in all some two dozen buildings—was very unlovely in
slumber. It sprawled in the lap of the prairies, a grimy-faced urchin,
with the lines of dismal sophistication writ deep. Yet where in all the
"health resorts" of the East did air sweep from the clean hill-country
with such revivifying power? It seemed a glad world of abiding youth.
Surely "Town" was but a dreary illusion, a mirage that hung in the
unmapped spaces of this new world that God had made and called good; an
omen of the abominations that men would make when they grew blind to the
beauty of God’s world.

Mary Carmichael, with much the feelings of a cat in a strange garret,
wandered about the sluggard town; and presently the blue-and-white sign of
a telegraph office, with the mythological figure of a hastening messenger,
suggested to her that a reassuring telegram was only Aunt Adelaide’s due.
Whereupon she began to rap on the door of the office, a scared pianissimo
which naturally had little effect on the operator, who was at home and
asleep some three blocks distant. But the West is the place for woman if
she would be waited upon. No seven-to-one ratio of the sexes has tempered
the chivalry of her sons of the saddle. A loitering something in a
sombrero saw rather than heard the rapping, and, at the sight, went in
quest of the dreaming operator without so much as embarrassing Miss
Carmichael with an offer of his services. And presently the operator,
whose official day did not begin for some two hours yet, appeared, much
dishevelled from running and the cursory nature of his toilet, prepared to
receive a message of life and death.