Well, I've called it "One Crowded Hour." The scene is a lonely telegraph station on the desert and the time is the present. The characters are: The Girl—The Brother—The Man.
The setting shows the front room of the telegraph station crude and rough and bare, just the ticker on the table, another table and three chairs, yet there is a pathetic attempt at softening the ugliness,—a bunch of dried grasses, magazine covers pinned to the wall, gay cushions in the chairs, a work basket, books.
At rise of curtain Girl is discovered alone, sewing. She is faintly, quaintly pretty in a mild New England way, no longer young, yet with a pathetic, persistent girlishness about her. A faint whistle is heard. She rises, goes to door of rear room and calls to Brother that the train has whistled for the bend. The two trains—east-bound and west-bound—are the events of their silent and solitary days. She brings him from rear room, her arm about him, steadying him. He is younger than his sister, frail, despondent. She seats him at the instrument and brings him a cup of hot broth, standing over him until he drinks it up.
The necessary exposition comes in brief dialogue: he has been sent west for his cough, has become so weak he is unable to do his work, has taught her, and she in reality carries on all the affairs of the lonely station. He stays in bed most of the time, only dragging himself up at train time, so that the trainmen will not suspect their secret.
The noise of the approaching limited grows louder and louder until it arrives with loud clamor just off stage. Girl runs out with the orders and the train is heard pulling out again. She comes in and is about to help him back to bed when the instrument begins to click and instantly they are electrified.
"The Hawk," a daring hold-up man who has baffled justice for a year, has just made off with the Bar K Ranch paysack and posses are forming, but the new sheriff has sworn to take him single-handed. Brother excitedly asserts that the sheriff can do it,—a regular fellow, that new sheriff,—looks and acts just like a man in a movie! He regrets that his sister was not at home the day he came to see them—the one time she'd left the station for more than an hour. She'd have liked him fine! They excitedly discuss the chances of the bandit's coming their way, for just beyond their station is the famous Pass through the mountains, through which so many rogues have ridden to freedom. In feverish haste Brother gets out his clumsy pistol and loads it, to her timid distress. Their drab day has turned to scarlet; he talks glowingly of the new sheriff, envies him.... Instrument clicks again. It is the sheriff, asking if they have seen a solitary horseman, and saying that he is on his way there, to watch the Pass.
Brother gets himself so wrought up that he brings on a fit of coughing and she makes him go back to bed.
Left alone again in the front room, she tries to settle down to her sewing, but she sings as she rocks—
"In days of old
When knights were bold,