There was a twinkle in the Texan's eye as he yawned and stretched prodigiously. "An' I'll tell 'em you're the damnedest liar in the state of Texas an' North America throw'd in. Come on, now, you throw the shells on them horses an' we'll be scratchin' gravel. Fifty miles ain't no hell of a ways--my throat's beginnin' to feel kind of draw'd already." "W'er' we goin'?" asked the half-breed as they swung into the saddles. "Bat," said the other, solemnly, "me an' you is goin' fast, an' we're goin' a long time. You mentioned somethin' about Montana bein' considerable of a cow country. Well, me an' you is a-goin' North--as far North as cattle is--an' we're right now on our way!" CHAPTER I THE TRAIN STOPS "I don't see why they had to build their old railroad down in the bottom of this river bed." With deft fingers Alice Marcum caught back a wind-tossed whisp of hair. "It's like travelling through a trough." "Line of the least resistance," answered her companion as he rested an arm upon the polished brass guard rail of the observation car. "This river bed, running east and west, saved them millions in bridges." The girl's eyes sought the sky-line of the bench that rose on both sides of the mile-wide valley through which the track of the great transcontinental railroad wound like a yellow serpent. "It's level up there. Why couldn't they have built it along the edge?" The man smiled: "And bridged all those ravines!" he pointed to gaps and notches in the level sky-line where the mouths of creek beds and coulees flashed glimpses of far mountains. "Each one of those ravines would have meant a trestle and trestles run into big money." "And so they built the railroad down here in this ditch where people have to sit and swelter and look at their old shiny rails and scraggly green bushes and dirt walls, while up there only a half a mile away the great rolling plains stretch away to the mountains that seem so near you could walk to them in an hour." "But, my dear girl, it would not be practical. Railroads are built primarily with an eye to dividends and--" The girl interrupted him with a gesture of impatience. "I hate things that are practical--hate even the word. There is nothing in all the world so deadly as practicability. It is ruthless and ugly. It disregards art and beauty and all the higher things that make life worth living. It is a monster whose god is dollars--and who serves that god well. What does any tourist know of the real West--the West that lies beyond those level rims of dirt? How much do you or I know of it? The West to us is a thin row of scrub bushes along a narrow, shallow river, with a few little white-painted towns sprinkled along, that for all we can see might be in Illinois or Ohio. I've been away a whole winter and for all the West I've seen I might as well have stayed in Brooklyn." "But certainly you enjoyed California!"