The years of absence had been years of growth, and though she had changed from child to woman in these suns and moons, she could not think of the Fork as anything other than the romantic town she had left--a list wherein spurred and steel-girt cow-men strode lamely over uneven sidewalks, or swooped, like the red nomads of the desert, in mad troops through the starlit night. The first hint of "the new West" came to her by way of the pretentious Hotel Alma, which stood opposite the station at Sulphur, and to which she was led by a colored porter of most elaborate and kindly manners. This house, which furnished an excellent dinner and an absorbing mixture of types both American and European, was vaguely disturbing to her. It was plainly not of the old-time West--the West her father had dominated in the days "before the invasion." It was, indeed, distinctly built for the tourist trade, and was filled with all that might indicate the comfortable nearness of big game and good fishing. Upon inquiry as to the stage, she was amazed to hear that an automobile now made the journey to the Fork in five hours, and that it left immediately after the midday meal. This was still more disconcerting than the hotel, but the closer she came to the ride, the more resigned she became, for she began to relive the long hours of torture on the trip outward, during which she had endured clouds of dust and blazing heat. There were some disadvantages in the old stage, romantic as her conception of it had been. Furthermore, the coach had gone; so she made application for her seat at once. At two o'clock, as the car came to the door, she entered it with a sense of having stepped from one invading chariot of progress to another, so big and shining and up to date was its glittering body, shining with brass and glowing with brave red paint. It was driven, also, by a small, lean young fellow, whom the cowboys on her father's ranch would have called a "lunger," so thin and small were his hands and arms. He was quite as far from old Tom Quentan as the car was from the coach on which he used to perch. The owner of the machine, perceiving under Virginia's veil a girl's pretty face, motioned her to the seat with the driver, and rode beside her for a few minutes (standing on the foot-board), to inquire if she were visiting friends in the Fork. "Yes," she replied, curtly, "I am." Something in her tone discouraged him from further inquiry, and he soon dropped away. The seats were apparently quite filled with men, when at the last moment a middle-aged woman, with a penetrating, nasal, drawling utterance, inquired if she were expected to be "squoze in betwixt them two strange men on that there back seat." Lee Virginia turned, and was about to greet the woman as an old acquaintance when something bold and vulgar in the complaining vixen's face checked the impulse.