Without regrets I abandoned my former seat-mate to her disappointment when she waked at North Platte. This car was the place for me, set apart by the salient presence of one person among all the others. That, however, is apt to differentiate city from city, and even land from land. Eventually I, also, slept--at first by fits and starts concomitant with railway travel by night, then more soundly when the "gentleman," my comrade in adventure, had been hauled out and deposited elsewhere. I fully awakened only at daylight. The train was rumbling as before. The lamps had been extinguished--the coach atmosphere was heavy with oil smell and the exhalations of human beings in all stages of deshabille. But the golden head was there, about as when last sighted. Now it stirred, and erected a little. I felt the unseemliness of sitting and waiting for her to make her toilet, so I hastily staggered to achieve my own by aid of the water tank, tin basin, roller towel and small looking-glass at the rear--substituting my personal comb and brush for the pair hanging there by cords. The coach was the last in the train. I stepped out upon the platform, for fresh air. We were traversing the real plains of the Great American Desert, I judged. The prairie grasses had shortened to brown stubble interspersed with bare sandy soil rising here and there into low hills. It was a country without north, south, east, west, save as denoted by the sun, broadly launching his first beams of the day. Behind us the single track of double rails stretched straight away as if clear to the Missouri. The dull blare of the car wheels was the only token of life, excepting the long-eared rabbits scampering with erratic high jumps, and the prairie dogs sitting bolt upright in the sunshine among their hillocked burrows. Of any town there was no sign. We had cut loose from company. Then we thundered by a freight train, loaded with still more ties and iron, standing upon a siding guarded by the idling trainmen and by an operator's shack. Smoke was welling from the chimney of the shack--and that domestic touch gave me a sense of homesickness. Yet I would not have been home, even for breakfast. This wide realm of nowhere fascinated with the unknown. The train and shack flattened into the landscape. A bevy of antelope flashed white tails at us as they scudded away. Two motionless figures, horseback, whom I took to be wild Indians, surveyed us from a distant sand-hill. Across the river there appeared a fungus of low buildings, almost indistinguishable, with a glimmer of canvas-topped wagons fringing it. That was the old emigrant road. While I was thus orienting myself in lonesome but not entirely hopeless fashion the car door opened and closed. I turned my head. The Lady of the Blue Eyes had joined me. As fresh as the morning she was. "Oh! You? I beg your pardon, sir." She apologized, but I felt that the diffidence was more politic than sincere.