OVERLANDERS GET A SHOCK
“Here we are again,” cried Lieutenant Hippy Wingate. “Cinnabar! All out for Cinnabar, the gateway to the great Yellowstone National Park. Get busy, you Overlanders, or you’ll be left.”
“Cinnabar! It sounds like something good to eat,” declared Stacy Brown. “The town doesn’t look as if it could furnish much food worthwhile,” he added, peering from the car window as he munched an apple.
“Perhaps not for an appetite such as yours,” retorted Emma Dean. “Why don’t you try absent treatment? Just imagine that you have had a most satisfying meal, and in a few moments you will forget all about your hunger.”
“We had to do that many times in France, did we not?” laughed Grace Harlowe, turning to her companion, Elfreda Briggs.
“Not ‘many times,’ but most of the time,” agreed Elfreda. “Alors! Let’s go!”
Gathering up their belongings, the Overland Riders moved towards the exit of their Pullman car just as the North Coast Limited roared up to the station at Cinnabar, the point at which thousands of tourists stop off during the summer season to visit the Yellowstone National Park, now the destination of the Overlanders themselves. A throng of tourists stepped down from the train to the long low platform in front of the little station.
Among the first to leave the train were the Overland Riders—Grace Harlowe Gray and her husband, Tom Gray, in the lead. A few moments later the train was rumbling away, enveloped in a black cloud of smoke.
Four-in-hand Concord coaches, old-fashioned but in good repair, to which handsome black horses were hitched, were drawn up to the platform to carry away the tourists. There was bustle and laughter and shouting and excitement among the tourists, in which the khaki-clad Overland Riders took no part, for they were experienced travelers now just starting out on their regular summer outing in the saddle. The Overlanders, however, were interested in the busy scene at the little station. The quaint little town with its wooden buildings built in irregular formation, like many other far western towns, sat in a vast amphitheater formed by surrounding mountain ranges.
“Come, girls,” urged Grace Harlowe. “We must busy ourselves, for we have much to do. Tom, please inquire if our guide, Jake Coville, is here.”