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One evening he leaned on the corral fence, looking toward the Dragoons. The sun had set behind them. Gigantic they loomed against the western light. From their summits, like an aureola, radiated the splendour of the dust-moted air, this evening a deep umber. A faint reflection of it fell across the desert, glorifying the reaches of its nothingness.

“I’ll take her out on an evening like this,” quoth Senor Johnson to himself, “and I’ll make her keep her eyes on the ground till we get right up by Running Bear Knob, and then I’ll let her look up all to once. And she’ll surely enjoy this life. I bet she never saw a steer roped in her life. She can ride with me every day out over the range and I’ll show her the busting and the branding and that band of antelope over by the Tall Windmill. I’ll teach her to shoot, too. And we can make little pack trips off in the hills when she gets too hot–up there by Deerskin Meadows ‘mongst the high peaks.”

He mused, turning over in his mind a new picture of his own life, aims, and pursuits as modified by the sympathetic and understanding companionship of a woman. He pictured himself as he must seem to her in his different pursuits. The picturesqueness pleased him. The simple, direct vanity of the man–the wholesome vanity of a straightforward nature–awakened to preen its feathers before the idea of the mate.

The shadows fell. Over the Chiricahuas flared the evening star. The plain, self-luminous with the weird lucence of the arid lands, showed ghostly. Jed Parker, coming out from the lamp-lit adobe, leaned his elbows on the rail in silent company with his chief. He, too, looked abroad. His mind’s eye saw what his body’s eye had always told him were the insistent notes–the alkali, the cactus, the sage, the mesquite, the lava, the choking dust, the blinding beat, the burning thirst. He sighed in the dim half recollection of past days.

“I wonder if she’ll like the country?” he hazarded.

But Senor Johnson turned on him his steady eyes, filled with the great glory of the desert.

“Like the country!” he marvelled slowly. “Of course! Why shouldn’t she?”

CHAPTER FIVE

THE ARRIVAL

The Overland drew into Willets, coated from engine to observation with white dust. A porter, in strange contrast of neatness, flung open the vestibule, dropped his little carpeted step, and turned to assist someone. A few idle passengers gazed out on the uninteresting, flat frontier town.

Senor Johnson caught his breath in amazement. “God! Ain’t she just like her picture!” he exclaimed. He seemed to find this astonishing.

For a moment he did not step forward to claim her, so she stood looking about her uncertainly, her leather suit-case at her feet.

She was indeed like the photograph. The same full-curved, compact little figure, the same round face, the same cupid’s bow mouth, the same appealing, large eyes, the same haze of doll’s hair. In a moment she caught sight of Senor Johnson and took two steps toward him, then stopped. The Senor at once came forward.

“You’re Mr. Johnson, ain’t you?” she inquired, thrusting her little pointed chin forward, and so elevating her baby-blue eyes to his.

“Yes, ma’am,” he acknowledged formally. Then, after a moment’s pause: “I hope you’re well.”

“Yes, thank you.”

The station loungers, augmented by all the ranchmen and cowboys in town, were examining her closely. She looked at them in a swift side glance that seemed to gather all their eyes to hers. Then, satisfied that she possessed the universal admiration, she returned the full force of her attention to the man before her.

“Now you give me your trunk checks,” he was saying, “and then we’ll go right over and get married.”