Half a box of soggy chocolates which the heat had rendered a dismally sticky mass won from them smiles and half-intelligible speech.

Fishing was poor--no ketchum.
Three--not even the diversion of the squaws to make her forget the dragging hours.

Nothing--nothing--nothing, she told herself apathetically when that third day had slipped upon the black cord of a soft, warm night, star-sprinkled and unutterably lonely as it brooded over the desert.
On the morning of the fourth day, Miss Georgie woke with the vague sense that something had gone wrong.

True railroader as she had come to be, she thought first that there had been a wreck, and that she was wanted at the telegraph instrument.

She was up and partly dressed before the steps and the voices which had broken her sleep had reached her door.
Pete Hamilton's voice, trembling with excitement, called to her.
"What is it?
What has happened ?" she cried from within, beset by a hundred wild conjectures.
"Saunders--somebody shot Saunders.