This was the first time he had been out alone with her, and the first time that he had had a chance to show her that he could be entertaining when he tried. Joyce and Mary and Phil had always had so much to say that he had kept in the background.
The sun on Lloyd's hair made it gleam like sunshine itself, tucked up under her jaunty little hunting-cap. The exercise was bringing a deeper colour to the delicate wild-rose pink of her cheeks, and, as her eyes smiled mischievously up at him whenever he told some tale that seemed almost too big to believe, he decided that she was quite the nicest girl he had ever known, except Joyce, and fully as agreeable to go hunting with as any boy.
In that short trip he pointed out more strange things than she could have seen in a whole afternoon in the streets of Paris or London. There were the wonderful tiny trap-doors leading down into the silk-lined tunnels of the cunning trap-door spiders; the hairy tarantulas; the lizards; the burrows of the jack-rabbits; a trail made by the feet of coyotes on their way to the White Bachelor's poultry-yard.
Then he pointed out a great cactus, sixty feet high, branched like a candelabrum, and told her that the thorny trunk is like a great sealed cup, full of the purest water, and that more than one traveller has saved his life by boring into one of these desert wells when he was perishing of thirst.
He told her how the Navajo Indians hunt the prairie-dogs, sticking up a piece of mirror at the entrance to the mound, and lying in wait for the little creature to come out. When it meets its own reflection, and sees what it supposes to be a strange prairie-dog mocking it at its own front door, it hurries out to fight, and the Indian pins it to the ground with his arrow.
"Now, we'll have to go faster and make up for lost time," he exclaimed, as they left the desert and turned into a road leading to Tempe, a little town several miles away on Salt River. "There is an old ruin near this road, where the Indians had a fort of some kind, that I'd like to show you, but it's getting late, and we'd better hurry on to the river. Let's gallop."
Lloyd had enjoyed many a swift ride, but none that had been so exhilarating as this. The pure, fresh air blowing over the desert was unlike any she had ever breathed before, it seemed so much purer and more life-giving. It was a joy just to be alive on such a day and in such a place. She felt that she knew some of the delight a bird must feel winging its wild, free way through the trackless sky.
"I'd like to show you the town, too," Jack said, as they came to the ford in the river leading over to Tempe. "The Mexican quarter is so foreign-looking. But, as we're out to kill, we'll just keep on this side, and follow the river up-stream a piece. Chris said that is where he saw the ducks."
"Oh, I'd be the proudest thing that evah walked," she exclaimed, "if I could only shoot one. A peacock couldn't hold a candle to me. It would be worth the trip to Arizona just to do that, if I nevah did anothah thing. How I could crow ovah Malcolm and Rob. Oh, Jack, you haven't any idea how much I want to!"
"You shall have first pop at them," Jack answered. "You don't stand as good a show with that little rifle as I do. You'll have to wait till you get up just as close as possible."