in the heat. It was such weather as we are having now. The young man, who
appeared to have everything to say about them, was of the country sporting
type, distinctly not the gentleman. In a cattle country he would have been
a cowboy simply. Your father thought he might have been employed on some
of the horse-breeding ranches below Auburn as a trainer of young stock. He
even wondered if he could have stolen the animals.

"But as the train moved out it appeared he had appropriated something of
greater value--a young girl, also a thoroughbred.

"It did not need the gossip of the train-hands to suggest that this was an
elopement of a highly sensational kind. Father was indignant at the jokes.
You know it is a saying with the common sort of people that in California
elopements become epidemic at certain seasons of the year--like earthquake
shocks or malaria. The man was handsome in a primitive way--worlds beneath
the girl, who was simply and tragically a lady. Father sat in the same car
with them, opposite their section. It grew upon him by degrees that she was
slowly awakening, as one who has been drugged, to a stupefied consciousness
of her situation. He thought there might still be room for help at the
crisis of her return to reason (I mean all this in a spiritual sense), and
so he kept near them. They talked but little together. The girl seemed
stunned, as I say, by physical exhaustion or that dawning comprehension
in which your father fancied he recognized the tragic element of the
situation.

"The young man was outwardly self-possessed, as horsemen are, but he seemed
constrained with the girl. They had no conversation, no topics in common.
He kept his place beside her, often watching her in silence, but he did not
obtrude himself. She appeared to have a certain power over him, even in her
helplessness, but it was slipping from her. In her eyes, as they rested