Then, the stage was rattling over the pressed brick pavement of Smelter City; and the tandem grays were pretending to shy at the electric cars; and the one-armed driver came near expectorating his entire internal anatomy out of sheer joy and pride in the arched necks and the frail driver with the black curls under the broad brimmed English sailor hat handling the reins. She had pulled off her heavy buckskin gloves; and she never knew how absurdly like matches her fingers looked to the big one-time miner beside her; nor how the exhilaration brought the tints of the painters' flower to her cheeks and the light of the Alpine pools to her eyes. Every man on the street turned and looked back, while the gold teeth inside blinked with self conscious certainty that _they_ did it; and the lavender silks wore a peculiarly cynical smile. Loafers sat up and followed the stage with eager eyes far as they could see it and said, "By Gawd--whose gurl is that?" Oh, Mr. Bat Brydges intended every bar room buffer and loafer in the State should know, 'whose girl' that was before night. Everything was fair in love and war; and Bat considered he had run down a case of both. According to his lights, he had; but his lights were smutty and in need of trimming. The stage dropped the gold teeth at a dentist's office, and the lavender silks at a manicure's 'studio,' I believe she called it; and Bat swung off while the coach was still moving; and Eleanor reluctantly gave up the reins at the transcontinental station. "Thank you so much. I don't know when I have had as good a time," she said, giving the stage driver the sensation of a king in disguise. And, of course, the transcontinental was late. When was it not late, when you were in a hurry? "How late?" "Four hours, last report," the operator answered. She sent her suit case across to the hotel, and shopped, and loitered up and down the platform. It was not until afterwards she remembered one of the loafer brigade dangling legs from the station platform looking over his shoulder with an evil smile. "Say--d' y' see the evening paper?" he had asked. "That's her;" and there was a laugh that somehow sent her back inside the station feeling vaguely uneasy. "I think I'll telephone them up at the Ranch not to keep dinner waiting," she said to the operator. He was reading the paper. He looked at her a moment before answering. If a human face could have been expressed in a punctuation mark, that agent's face should have been drawn in a big question mark, with the eyes put somewhere in the hook, and the neck growing longer and longer as he looked. "Public telephone right across the road," he said.