The town—it would be unkind to mention its name—had made merry the night before at the comprehensive invitation of a sheepman who had just disposed of his wool-clip, and who said, by way of general summons, “What’s the use of temptin’ the bank?” “Town,” therefore, when Mary Carmichael first made its acquaintance, was still sleeping the sleep of the unjust. Those among last night’s roisterers who had had to make an early start for their camps were well into the foot-hills by this time, and would remember with exhilaration the cracked tinkle of the dance-hall piano as inspiring music when the lonesomeness of the desert menaced and the young blood again clamored for its own. “Town”—it contained in all some two dozen buildings—was very unlovely in slumber. It sprawled in the lap of the prairies, a grimy-faced urchin, with the lines of dismal sophistication writ deep. Yet where in all the “health resorts” of the East did air sweep from the clean hill-country with such revivifying power? It seemed a glad world of abiding youth. Surely “Town” was but a dreary illusion, a mirage that hung in the unmapped spaces of this new world that God had made and called good; an omen of the abominations that men would make when they grew blind to the beauty of God’s world. Mary Carmichael, with much the feelings of a cat in a strange garret, wandered about the sluggard town; and presently the blue-and-white sign of a telegraph office, with the mythological figure of a hastening messenger, suggested to her that a reassuring telegram was only Aunt Adelaide’s due. Whereupon she began to rap on the door of the office, a scared pianissimo which naturally had little effect on the operator, who was at home and asleep some three blocks distant. But the West is the place for woman if she would be waited upon. No seven-to-one ratio of the sexes has tempered the chivalry of her sons of the saddle. A loitering something in a sombrero saw rather than heard the rapping, and, at the sight, went in quest of the dreaming operator without so much as embarrassing Miss Carmichael with an offer of his services. And presently the operator, whose official day did not begin for some two hours yet, appeared, much dishevelled from running and the cursory nature of his toilet, prepared to receive a message of life and death. The wire to Aunt Adelaide ran: “Practically at end of journey. Take stage to Lost Trail this morning. Am well. Don’t worry about me. “MARY.” And the telegraph operator, dimly remembering that he had heard Lost Trail was a “pizen mean country,” and that it was tucked some two hundred miles back in the foot-hills, did not find it very hard to forgive the girl, who was “practically at end of journey,” particularly as the dimple had come out of hiding, and he had never been called upon to telegraph the word “practically” before. He was a progressive man and liked to extend his experiences.