He waited a minute longer, and then sidled out, and when he was heard crunching over the cinders with his barrow-load of boxes, she switched off the current abruptly, and went over to the window to watch him.
"Item," she began aloud, when he was quite gone, her eyes staring vacantly down the scintillating rails to where they seemed to meet in one glittering point far away in the desert.

"Item--" But whatever the item was, she jotted it down silently in that mental memorandum book which was one of her whims.

"Once I put a thing in that little blue book of mine," she used to tell her father, "it's there for keeps.

And there's the advantage that I never leave it lying around to be lost, or for other people to pick up and read to my everlasting undoing.

It's better than cipher--for I don't talk in my sleep." The four-thirty-five train came in its own time, and brought the two missing placer miners.