TO
"MY LADY"
LOTUS McGLASHAN GREGORY
THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED




UNDER HANDICAP

CHAPTER I


Outside there was shimmering heat and dry, thirsty sand, miles upon
miles of it flashing by in a gray, barren blur. A flat, arid,
monotonous land, vast, threatening, waterless, treeless. Its immensity
awed, its bleakness depressed. Man's work here seemed but to
accentuate the puny insignificance of man. Man had come upon the
desert and had gone, leaving only a line of telegraph-poles with their
glistening wires, two gleaming parallel rails of burning steel to mark
his passing.

The thundering Overland Limited, rushing onward like a frightened
thing, screamed its terror over the desert whose majesty did not even
permit of its catching up the shriek of the panting engine to fling it
back in echoes. The desert ignored, and before and behind the
onrushing train the deep serenity of the waste places was undisturbed.

Within the train the desert was nothing. Man's work defied the heat
and the sand and the sullen frown outside. Here in the Pullman