“I opened up the store, and then I went back to bed,” Saunders replied limply. “Just got up when the freight pulled in. Made so blamed much noise it woke me. I seem to need a good deal of sleep.” He coughed behind his hand, and lingered inside the door. It was so unusual for Miss Georgie to make conversation with him that Saunders was almost pitifully eager to be agreeable. “If it didn't sound cruel, this weather,” said Miss Georgie lightly, still looking at him--or, more particularly, at the crumpled, soiled collar of his coarse blue shirt--“I'd advise you to get out of Hartley once a day, if it was no more than to take a walk. Though to be sure,” she smiled, “the prospect is not inviting, to say the least. Put it would be a change; I'd run up and down the track, if I didn't have to stick here in this office all day.” “I can't stand walking,” Saunders whined. “It makes me cough.” To illustrate, he gave another little hack behind his hand. “I went up to the stable yesterday with a book, and laid down in the hay. And I went to sleep, and Pete thought I was lost, I guess.” He grinned, which was not pleasant, for he chewed tobacco and had ugly, discolored teeth into the bargain. “I like to lay in the hay,” he added lifelessly. “I guess I'll take my bed up there; that lean-to is awful hot.” “Well, you're lucky that you can do exactly as you please, and sleep whenever you please.” Miss Georgie turned to her telegraph instrument, and began talking in little staccato sparks of electricity to the agent at Shoshone, merely as a hint to Saunders to take himself away. “Ain't been anything for me?” he asked, still lingering. Miss Georgie shook her head. He waited a minute longer, and then sidled out, and when he was heard crunching over the cinders with his barrow-load of boxes, she switched off the current abruptly, and went over to the window to watch him. “Item,” she began aloud, when he was quite gone, her eyes staring vacantly down the scintillating rails to where they seemed to meet in one glittering point far away in the desert. “Item--” But whatever the item was, she jotted it down silently in that mental memorandum book which was one of her whims. “Once I put a thing in that little blue book of mine,” she used to tell her father, “it's there for keeps. And there's the advantage that I never leave it lying around to be lost, or for other people to pick up and read to my everlasting undoing. It's better than cipher--for I don't talk in my sleep.”