"If I have to be a Polly-put-the-kettle-on all the days of my life, I'll just be one," she said, in a half-whisper, giving the towel she was wringing a vicious twist. "I'm not going out there to have him feel sorry for me. He's used to seeing girls who are always dainty and fresh, like his sister Elsie, and I'm not going to let him see me looking like a poor, bedraggled Cinderella. It isn't fair that some people should have all the good things in life, and others nothing but the drudgery.
"Jack doesn't seem to mind it. There he stands out in the road in his old faded, paint-smeared overalls, and his sleeves rolled up, never caring how awkward and lanky he looks. He's taking as eager an interest in that horse's good points as if he were to have the pleasure of riding it. But then Jack hasn't the artistic temperament. He likes this wild country out here, and he never can understand what a daily sacrifice it is for me to live in such a place. My whole life is just a sacrifice to mamma and the children."
By the time the basket was full of clothes, ready to be hung on the line, Joyce had worked herself up to such a pitch of self-pity that she felt like a martyr going to the stake. She carried the basket to the sunny space behind the tents, where the line had been stretched. Here, with her sunbonnet pulled over her eyes, she could see without being seen. Phil was just riding away whistling. She watched him out of sight. The desert seemed lonelier than ever when the sound of hoof-beats and the cheery tune had passed. Her gaze wandered back to old Camelback Mountain. "We'll never get away, you and I," she whispered. "All the bright, pleasant things in life will ride by and leave us. Only the work and the waiting and the loneliness will stay."
When she went back to the house with her empty basket, Jack was rubbing away with a vigour that was putting holes in one of Holland's shirts.
"Why didn't you come out and see Phil's new horse?" he cried, enthusiastically. "He let me try him, and he goes like a bird. And say, Joyce, he knows where I could get the best kind of an Indian pony for almost nothing, at a camp near Scottsdale. It is good size, and it's broke either to the saddle or buggy, and the people will sell it for only ten dollars. Just think of that. It's almost giving it away. The man who had it died, and his wife couldn't take it back East with her, and she told them to sell it for anything they could get. Don't you think we could manage in some way to get it, Joyce?"
"Why, Jack Ware! What can you be thinking of!" she cried. "For us to spend ten dollars on a horse that we don't need would be just as great an extravagance as for some people to spend ten hundred. Don't you know that we can only buy things that we absolutely have to eat or to wear? You've surely heard it dinned into your ears long enough to get some such idea into your head."
"We don't absolutely have to have a washing-machine and wringer," he declared, nettled by Joyce's unusual tone. "A horse would be lots more use. We could have it to bring wood up with from the desert when we've burned all that's close by. And we can't go on all year borrowing a horse from Mrs. Lee every time we want to go to town, or have to have a new supply of groceries."
"But you know well enough that mamma's teaching Hazel, after awhile when she gets well enough, will more than make up for the borrowing we will do," answered Joyce. "Besides it would only be the beginning of a lot of expense. There'd be feed and a saddle to start with."
"No, there wouldn't! There's all that alfalfa pasture going to waste behind the house, and Mrs. Lee has a saddle hanging up in her attic that somebody left on a board bill. She said I might use it as often as I pleased."