"Joyce," he called, peering down the barrels to see if any speck of rust had gathered in them, "do you suppose we brought any machine-oil with us? I'll uncrate the sewing-machine if you think that the can is likely to be in one of the drawers."
"I don't know," answered Joyce, in such a hopeless tone that Jack lowered his gun-barrels and stared at her in astonishment. Her back was toward him, but her voice certainly sounded choked with tears. It was so unusual for Joyce to cry that he felt that something very serious must be the cause.
"What's the matter, sister?" he inquired. "You aren't sick, are you?"
"Yes!" she exclaimed, with a sob, turning and throwing herself down on the pile of pillows he had just unpacked. "I'm sick of everything in this awful country! I'm sick of the desert, and of seeing nothing but invalids and sand and cactus and jack-rabbits wherever I go. And I'm sick of the prospect of living in this little hole of a mud-house, and working like a squaw, and never doing anything or being anything worth while. If I thought I had to go on all my life this way, I'd want to die right now!"
Jack viewed her uneasily. "Goodness, Joyce! I never knew you to go all to pieces this way before. You've always been the one to preach to us when things went wrong, that if we'd be inflexible that fortune would at last change in our favour."
"Inflexible fiddlesticks!" stormed Joyce from the depths of a bolster, where she had hidden her face, "I've been holding out against fate so long that I can't do it any more, and I'm going to give up, right here and now!"
"Then I don't know what will become of the rest of us," answered Jack, raising his empty gun to aim at a butcher-bird in the fig-tree outside the door. "It's you that has always kept things cheerful when we were down in the mouth."
Joyce sat up and wiped her eyes. "I think that it must be that old camel-back mountain out there that makes me feel so hopeless. It is so depressing to see it kneeling there in the sand, day after day, like a poor old broken-down beast of burden, unable to move another step. It is just like us. Fate is too much for it."
Jack's glance followed hers through the open door. Straight and level, the desert stretched away toward the horizon, where a circle of mountains seemed to rise abruptly from the sands, and shut them in. There was Squaw's Peak on the left, cold and steely blue, and over on the right the bare buttes, like mounds of red ore, and just in front was the mountain they must face every time they looked from the door. Some strange freak of nature had given it the form of a giant camel, five miles long. There it knelt in the sand, with patient outstretched neck, and such an appearance of hopeless resignation to its lot, that Joyce was not the only one who found it depressing. More than one invalid, sent to the surrounding ranches for the life-giving atmosphere of Arizona, had turned his back on it with a shiver of premonition, saying, "It's just like me! Broken-down, and left to die on the desert. Neither of us will ever get away."
It made no difference to Jack what shape the mountains took. He could not understand Joyce's sensitiveness to her surroundings. But it made him uncomfortable to see her so despondent. He sat hugging his gun in silence a moment, not knowing how to answer her, and then began idly aiming it first in one direction, then another. Presently his glance happened to rest upon a battered book that had fallen from one of the boxes. He drew it toward him with his foot. It was open at a familiar picture, and on the opposite page was a paragraph which he had read so many times, that he could almost repeat it from memory.