The Quirt | Page 6

the idea had never before crystallized into action. Why should she feed
her imagination upon a mimic West, when the great, glorious real West
was there? What if her dad had not written a word for more than a year?
He must be alive; they would surely have heard of his death, for she
and Royal were his sole heirs, and his partner would have their address.
She walked fast and arrived at the telephone booth so breathless that
she was compelled to wait a few minutes before she could call her
number. She inquired about trains and rates to Echo, Idaho.
Echo, Idaho! While she waited for the information clerk to look it up
the very words conjured visions of wide horizons and clean winds and
high adventure. If she pictured Echo, Idaho, as being a replica of the

"set" used in the movie serial, can you wonder? If she saw herself, the
beloved queen of her father's cowboys, dashing into Echo, Idaho, on a
crimply-maned broncho that pirouetted gaily before the post-office
while handsome young men in chaps and spurs and "big four" Stetsons
watched her yearningly, she was merely living mentally the only West
that she knew.
From that beatific vision Lorraine floated into others more entrancing.
All the hairbreadth escapes of the heroine of the movie serial were hers,
adapted by her native logic to fit within the bounds of
possibility,--though I must admit they bulged here and there and
threatened to overlap and to encroach upon the impossible. Over the
hills where her father's vast herds grazed, sleek and wild and
long-horned and prone to stampede, galloped the Lorraine of Lorraine's
dreams, on horses sure-footed and swift. With her galloped strong men
whose faces limned the features of her favorite Western "lead."
That for all her three years of intermittent intimacy with a
disillusioning world of mimicry, her dreams were pure romance,
proved that Lorraine had still the unclouded innocence of her girlhood
unspoiled.
CHAPTER THREE
REALITY IS WEIGHED AND FOUND WANTING
Still dreaming her dreams, still featuring herself as the star of many
adventures, Lorraine followed the brakeman out of the dusty day coach
and down the car steps to the platform of the place called Echo, Idaho. I
can only guess at what she expected to find there in the person of a
cattle-king father, but whatever it was she did not find it. No father, of
any type whatever, came forward to claim her. In spite of her
"Western" experience she looked about her for a taxi, or at least a street
car. Even in the wilds of Western melodrama one could hear the clang
of street-car gongs warning careless autoists off the track.
After the train had hooted and gone on around an absolutely
uninteresting low hill of yellow barrenness dotted with stunted sage, it

was the silence that first impressed Lorraine disagreeably. Echo, Idaho,
was a very poor imitation of all the Western sets she had ever seen.
True, it had the straggling row of square-fronted, one-story buildings,
with hitch rails, but the signs painted across the fronts were absolutely
common. Any director she had ever obeyed would have sent for his
assistant director and would have used language which a lady must not
listen to. Behind the store and the post-office and the blacksmith shop,
on the brow of the low hill around whose point the train had
disappeared, were houses with bay windows and porches absolutely out
of keeping with the West. So far as Lorraine could see, there was not a
log cabin in the whole place.
The hitch rails were empty, and there was not a cowboy in sight. Before
the post-office a terribly grimy touring car stood with its
running-boards loaded with canvas-covered suitcases. Three goggled,
sunburned women in ugly khaki suits were disconsolately drinking
soda water from bottles without straws, and a goggled, red-faced,
angry-looking man was jerking impatiently at the hood of the machine.
Lorraine and her suitcase apparently excited no interest whatever in
Echo, Idaho.
The station agent was carrying two boxes of oranges and a crate of
California cabbages in out of the sun, and a limp individual in blue
gingham shirt and dirty overalls had shouldered the mail sack and was
making his way across the dusty, rut-scored street to the post-office.
Two questions and two brief answers convinced her that the station
agent did not know Britton Hunter,--which was strange, unless this
happened to be a very new agent. Lorraine left him to his cabbages and
followed the man with the mail sack.
At the post-office the anemic clerk came forward, eyeing her with
admiring curiosity. Lorraine had seen anemic young men all her life,
and the last three years had made her perfectly familiar with that look
in a young