Wherefore he enjoyed his onions and potatoes, his stewed tomatoes and fried corn all the more because he knew how certain eyebrows would lift in astonishment could their owners look in upon the wealthy William Gordon Dale, and see how he was enjoying his plebeian fare.
"Doris would like a taste of this grub," he told himself gayly as he filled his plate the second time. "She's hypnotized now with the novelty of it—dazzled with the glamor. But it's no natural life for anybody that has lived the real thing; seen life stripped down to reality. It's all pretense—and Doris is more than half pretending, herself. Pretending she likes that sort of thing—when she's probably half homesick, right now, for the desert, and won't admit it.
"Wait till she sees the house I'll build for her! No great barn of a place that she couldn't use, out here—but a jewel of a home. Everything she likes that will fit in here. I know! I've watched her eyes when we struck some new place. Big, rock fireplace—Parowan rock; beamed ceilings, broad stairway, hardwood floors—great, long stretches of space with arches—and a big window framing the desert like a picture. What she calls a vista. I know—you bet I know! She thinks I'm going to build some darned box of a place, perhaps of cement. I let her think so. It'll be all rock, and glass, and hardwoods that will last a century and longer.
"I'll find a hillside where the town won't be right under her nose, and I'll frame a vista for her with every window in the house! She can have house parties, if she wants to—lots of those city folks would be crazy to come and spend a week or two over here. In fact, they've thrown out hints about it, some of them—only Doris wouldn't take it that way.
"Things'll grow, here," he went on, thinking and planning more hopefully than he had done for months. "I'll have grounds laid out, and things planted that will make our home a garden spot. It may cost something, but——" He grinned then, and offered Hez a bacon rind and held his chops for a minute so that he could gaze deep into his eyes.
"Hez, you old devil, I believe you're kind of glad I came home," he said, and lingered wistfully on the last word. "You can be bodyguard for little Mary, when she gets to toddling around. I'll have to put a fence around the place to keep her in, I expect. You'd take care of the snakes and scorpions and such, wouldn't you, old boy? Never saw a bug get away from you yet."
Tommy came, with Luella riding solemnly on his shoulder. Bill rose to greet her, having been schooled in his deportment toward ladies. Luella craned her neck and eyed him suspiciously while he coaxed her, then remembered and stepped gravely upon his inviting forefinger.
"I'll be damned," she observed, looking at him with her head tilted. "Look who's here! When did you get in?"
"You can't tell me this bird ain't human," Bill exclaimed much impressed by the remark.
"She's heard that talk in the s'loon," Tommy discounted her intelligence. "If she don't speak worse things I'll be contint. Your turkle's gone, Mr. Dale. I'm thinkin' she's wandered away, an' I've a reward out fer her—if it's a her, which I dunno—an' I'm hopin' she'll be returned to yuh. It's a week ago she disappeared—she did that."