Before she could say anything more, however, Mrs. Old Joe returned to the hut with the Papago girl and her mother, and she set her mind to the faithful performance of Jacinta’s errand. It was quickly arranged that the handmaiden should be brought at once to the Palo Verde, and the matter completed, the two white women rode away together.
A soft wind was blowing across their faces; a wind full of the essential odor of the desert: impalpable, a little acrid, bracing withal, and subtly suggestive of mystery, and of vastness. Helen threw back her head, yielding to the desert spell.
“Oh!” she cried, “this is the place to be, after all. Don’t you feel so about it?” she demanded of her companion.
“I don’t know,” Kate Hallard was watching her, puzzled. “I never was away from it. Sometimes it makes me ache.”
“Ache?” It was the girl’s turn to be mystified.
“Yes.” The woman could not have told why the hidden thoughts of her heart suddenly became articulate at this girl’s invitation to speech.
“It always seems to me as if the desert—wants something,” she explained, hesitatingly. “I d’ know what ’tis, but the feeling’s there: a sort of emptiness, as if it wanted to cry and couldn’t. Sometimes at night, when I hear a burro ‘yee-haw,’ or a coyote howlin’, seems to me like’s if, if the desert could cry that’s the kind o’ noise it would make. It’s like lonesome women—if there’s any sense in that!” she added with a half-ashamed laugh.
Helen’s heart was full of sympathy that she felt was but partially understanding. So this was what the desert had brought to this hard-seeming woman. She had a sudden sorry realization that the marvelous waste had never told its ache to her, dearly as she loved it, and with the realization came the knowledge that the woman beside her understood because she had truly lived and suffered in it. It came to her to wonder if Gard had ever felt the ache of the desert.
“Do you ever want to get away from it?” she asked, softly.
“I d’ know,” her companion considered.