Well, there was no help for it, of course, and she had only herself to blame for the blunder. For the other--not unusual--irritating details that had combined to place her in this awkward position she could blame, first Duncan, the manager of the Double R--who should have sent someone to meet her at the station; the station agent--who had allowed her to set forth in search of the Double R without a guide,--though even now, considering this phase of the situation, she remembered that the agent had told her there was no one to send--and certainly the desolate appearance of Lazette had borne out this statement; and last, she could blame the country itself for being an unfeatured wilderness. Something might be said in extenuation of the station agent's and the Double R manager's sins of omission, but without doubt the country was what she had termed it--an unfeatured wilderness. Her first sensation upon getting a view of the country had been one of deep disappointment. There was plenty of it, she had decided,--enough to make one shrink from its very bigness; yet because it was different from the land she had been accustomed to she felt that somehow it was inferior. Her father had assured her of its beauty, and she had come prepared to fall in love with it, but within the last half hour--when she had begun to realize that she had lost the trail--she had grown to hate it. She hated the desolation, the space, the silence, the arid stretches; she had made grimaces at the "cactuses" with their forbidding pricklers--though she could not help admiring them, they seemed to be the only growing thing in the country capable of defying the heat and the sun. Most of all she hated the alkali dust. All afternoon she had kept brushing it off her clothing and clearing it out of her throat, and only within the last half hour she had begun to realize that her efforts had been without result--it lay thick all over her; her throat was dry and parched with it, and her eyes burned. She sat erect, flushed and indignant, to look around at the country. A premonitory calm had succeeded the warning rumble. Ominous black clouds were scurrying, wind-whipped, spreading fan-like through the sky, blotting out the colors of the sunset, darkening the plains, creating weird shadows. Objects that Sheila had been able to see quite distinctly when she had reined in her pony were no longer visible. She stirred uneasily. "We'll go somewhere," she said aloud to the pony, as she urged the animal down the slope. "If it rains we'll get just as wet here as we would anywhere else." She was surprised at the queer quiver in her voice. She was going to be brave, of course, but somehow there seemed to be little consolation in the logic of her remark.