Any father can continue this lament from memory. The discussion had ended as discussions with spoiled children usually end. There had been a hurried packing and the familiar trip across the continent. It was only when she alighted at a border town and after some anxious hours waiting to have her passports vised and her transportation arranged, embarked on the shabby south-bound train on the other side, that Polly fully realized the expedition to which she was committed. Up to this time her thoughts had been of the life she was leaving, and, it must be admitted, of Joyce Henderson. From Illinois to Texas she told herself exactly what she thought of a man who could so boldly and plainly and with such an evident relief accept his dismissal at the hands of the girl he had claimed to love; but by the time the train had jogged through miles of queer brownish yellow country, dotted with mesquite and punctured with cactus, relieved here and there by foothills, and frowned upon by distant mountains, her meditations assumed a more cheerful complexion. The outlook, monotonous as it was, fascinated her. There were adobe houses with brown youngsters playing in the scanty shade, much as one sees them in New Mexico and Arizona; there were uprooted rails and the ruins of burned cars--evidences of civil war unknown on our side of the line. There was a strong wind blowing--the early spring wind of the Southwest, but the sun shone hotly and one felt stuffy and uncomfortable in the car. The sand which was caught up by the wind blew in one's face and down one's throat and made closed windows a necessity. There were a good many people traveling, for a country in a reputedly unsettled condition, Polly thought, and wished that she could understand the fragments of conversation that she heard. "Why didn't I take Spanish instead of French at school? I always seem to have chosen the most useless things to study! I wish I knew what those two fat women without any hats on are talking about--me, I suppose, for they keep looking over here. That man is American--or English. If I were Bob, I'd amble over and get up a conversation with him and find out all the interesting things I'm missing. I'll bet he owns a mine down here somewhere. How fascinating!" Polly's imagination immediately forsook the American and indulged in a rosy picture of herself as the owner of a mine--a gold mine--coal was too unromantic. She saw herself in a short skirt and a sombrero superintending the exertions of a number of dusky workers who were loading neat little gold bars on the backs of patient burros.