manners and conditions, and there were greater distances between her
life and Eric’s than all the miles which separated Rattlesnake Creek
from New York city. Indeed, she had no business to be in the West at
all; but ah! across what leagues of land and sea, by what improbable
chances, do the unrelenting gods bring to us our fate!
It was in a year of financial depression that Wyllis Elliot came to
Nebraska to buy cheap land and revisit the country where he had
spent a year of his youth. When he had graduated from Harvard it was
still customary for moneyed gentlemen to send their scapegrace sons
to rough it on ranches in the wilds of Nebraska or Dakota, or to
consign them to a living death in the sage-brush of the Black Hills.
These young men did not always return to the ways of civilized life.
But Wyllis Elliot had not married a half-breed, nor been shot in a
cow-punchers’ brawl, nor wrecked by bad whisky, nor appropriated by
a smirched adventuress. He had been saved from these things by a
girl, his sister, who had been very near to his life ever since the
days when they read fairy tales together and dreamed the dreams that
never come true. On this, his first visit to his father’s ranch
since he left it six years before, he brought her with him. She had
been laid up half the winter from a sprain received while skating,
and had had too much time for reflection during those months. She
was restless and filled with a desire to see something of the wild
country of which her brother had told her so much. She was to be
married the next winter, and Wyllis understood her when she begged
him to take her with him on this long, aimless jaunt across the
continent, to taste the last of their freedom together. It comes to
all women of her type—that desire to taste the unknown which
allures and terrifies, to run one’s whole soul’s length out to the
wind—just once.
It had been an eventful journey. Wyllis somehow understood that
strain of gypsy blood in his sister, and he knew where to take her.
They had slept in sod houses on the Platte River, made the
acquaintance of the personnel of a third-rate opera company on the
train to Deadwood, dined in a camp of railroad constructors at the
world’s end beyond New Castle, gone through the Black Hills on
horseback, fished for trout in Dome Lake, watched a dance at Cripple
Creek, where the lost souls who hide in the hills gathered for their
besotted revelry. And now, last of all, before the return to
thraldom, there was this little shack, anchored on the windy crest
of the Divide, a little black dot against the flaming sunsets, a
scented sea of cornland bathed in opalescent air and blinding
sunlight.
Margaret Elliot was one of those women of whom there are so many in
this day, when old order, passing, giveth place to new; beautiful,
talented, critical, unsatisfied, tired of the world at twenty-four.
For the moment the life and people of the Divide interested her. She
was there but a week; perhaps had she stayed longer, that inexorable
ennui which travels faster even than the Vestibule Limited would
have overtaken her. The week she tarried there was the week that
