CHAPTER I

BURTON BECOMES AN AMBASSADOR

 

When Hugh Burton stepped from the train at High Ridge, he wondered (in his ignorance of the events that were about to engage him) whether he would be able to catch a return train that evening. He had no desire to linger in this half-grown town on the western edge of civilization one minute longer than his fool errand demanded. He called it a "fool errand" every time he thought of his mission. That he, who had secretly prided himself on the "disengaged" attitude which he had always maintained toward life, should have consented to come halfway across the continent to hunt up a Miss Leslie Underwood whom he had never met, and ask her if she would not be so kind as to reconsider her refusal to marry Philip Overman, because Philip was really taking it very hard, don't you know, and particularly because Philip's mother would be quite distracted if the boy should carry out his threat to enlist and go to the Philippines,--oh, Lord! he must have had some unsuspected idiot among his ancestors. Did Rachel Overman know how heavily she was drawing on his friendship?

An Indian woman sitting on the stone steps of the railway station made him realize how near the edge of civilization, in very truth, he had come. There was, he remembered, a Reservation for Indians on the northern border of the State. It could not be very far from High Ridge.

With her bright shawl about her shoulders and her beadwork and baskets spread about her, the woman made a picturesque spot in the sunshine. At another time Burton would have stopped to examine her wares, for among his other dilettante pursuits was an interest in Indian basketry; but in his present impatient mood he would have pushed past with a mere glance but for one of those queer little incidents that we call accidental. A man who was coming down the steps that Burton was about to ascend passed near the black-eyed 

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