"Engagements, eh? No, sir!" he replied. "She runs things after the steers is unloaded. Whatever the little gal says goes with me." They turned, and as they came on down the hall, still chatting, I saw her face, and knew it. It was the Empress! But even in that glimpse I saw the change which years had brought. Now she ruled instead of submitting; her voice, still soft and low, had lost its rustic inflections; and in spite of the change in the surroundings,--the leap from the art gallery to the Stock Yards,--there was more of the artist now, and less of the farmer's lass. They turned into a suite of offices and disappeared. "Well, Mr. Barslow," said my friend, coming up. "Glad to see you. I've been hunting for you." "Who is that girl and her father?" I asked. "One of the Johnson Commission Company's Shippers," said he, "Prescott, from Lattimore; I wish I could get his shipments." "No!" said I, "Not Lattimore!" "Prescott of Lattimore," he repeated. "Know anything of him?" "N-no," said I. "I have friends in that town." "I wish I had," was the reply; "I'd try to get old Prescott's business." * * * * * "There's destiny in this," said Alice, when I told her of my encounter with the Empress and her father. "Her living in Lattimore is not an accident." "I doubt," said I, "if anybody's is." "She looked nice, did she?" Alice went on, "and dressed well?" and without waiting for an answer added: "Let's leave Chicago. I'm anxious to get to Lattimore!" CHAPTER V. We Reach the Atoll. So we journeyed on to Duluth, to St. Paul and Minneapolis, and to the cities on the Missouri. It was at one of those recurrent periods when the fever of material and industrial change and development breaks out over the whole continent. The very earth seemed to send out tingling shocks of some occult stimulus; the air was charged with the ozone of hope; and subtle suggestions seemed to pass from mind to mind, impelling men to dare all, to risk all, to achieve all. In every one of these young cities we were astonished at the changes going on under our very eyes. Streets were torn up for the building of railways, viaducts, and tunnels. Buildings were everywhere in course of demolition, to make room for larger edifices. Excavations yawned like craters at street-corners. Steel pillars, girders, and trusses towered skyward,--skeletons to be clothed in flesh of brick and stone. Suburbs were sprouting, almost daily, from the mould of the market-gardens in the purlieus. Corporations were contending for the possession of the natural highway approaches to each growing city. Street-railway companies pushed their charters to passage at midnight sessions of boards of aldermen, seized streets in the night-time, and extended their metallic tentacles out into the fields of dazed farmers.