“I ain’t never known what anything else is like,” she finally said, helplessly, “but seems to me you git to feel like’s if you was part of the desert, an’ something would break if you got too far off.”
Ah! That Helen knew. She had hungered for the desert, even if she had never ached with it.
“It’s the place of places for me,” cried she, taking off her hat and letting the wind stir her hair.
Kate Hallard studied her, wonderingly. She had known few women in her life; never before so youthful a one. She wondered what Gabriel Gard had thought of this girl.
“Mr. Gard’s at the rancho ain’t he?” she asked, and Helen’s cheek paled for an instant. The older woman noted the fact with a fierce little pang.
“He went back to Sylvania this morning,” Helen answered, and the other looked her surprise.
“I didn’t suppose he’d git away so quick,” she said. “Sandy Larch was in yesterday an’ said he was in for another week. If I’d known he was comin’ in I wouldn’t a’ gone off,” she added, and a sense of the desert’s ache crept into Helen’s own heart.
Yes: Mrs. Hallard was right: it was a lonely place.
Arrived at the Palo Verde, the girl called Wing Chang, telling him the business of the moment, and directed him to send in his young relative. Then she took Mrs. Hallard to her own room, a big, low-ceilinged place, with wide windows looking out toward the far mountains. Kate gazed about her wistfully. She had seen few women’s rooms in her lifetime.
This one was the sort of composite suggestion of dear girl and nice boy that the modern college girl’s room is apt to be. Cushions blazoned with the initials of Radcliffe and of Harvard heaped a couch covered with the skin of a mountain lion that Helen herself had shot. Among the pretty trifles on the dresser was a practical-looking little revolver, and from one of the two hooks that held her light rifle hung an illumined panel bearing the arms of Radcliffe. A cartridge-belt hung from another hook, and beneath it, on a stand, lay a bit of dainty embroidery which she had been working on that very morning.