The prayer of her dreams had been answered.

To bring good fortune to her family; to take care of this beautiful, wild little sister; to leave the yellow, sordid, humdrum towns for the great, rolling, boundless open; to live on a wonderful ranch that was some day to be her own; to have fulfilled a deep, instinctive, and undeveloped love of horses, cattle, sheep, of desert and mountain, of trees and brooks and wild flowers--all this was the sum of her most passionate longings, now in some marvelous, fairylike way to come true.
A check to her happy anticipations, a blank, sickening dash of cold water upon her warm and intimate dreams, had been the discovery that Harve Riggs was on the train.

His presence could mean only one thing--that he had followed her.

Riggs had been the worst of many sore trials back there in St.Joseph.He had possessed some claim or influence upon her mother, who favored his offer of marriage to Helen; he was neither attractive, nor good, nor industrious, nor anything that interested her; he was the boastful, strutting adventurer, not genuinely Western, and he affected long hair and guns and notoriety.

Helen had suspected the veracity of the many fights he claimed had been his, and also she suspected that he was not really big enough to be bad--as Western men were bad.