“No, neither of us. I went over with the buggy when the wheel cramped, but SHE jumped clear.”
He made a gesture indicating the presence of another. The man turned quickly. There was a second figure, a young girl standing beside the grain from which he had emerged, embracing a few stalks of wheat with one arm and a hand in which she still held her parasol, while she grasped her gathered skirts with the other, and trying to find a secure foothold for her two neat narrow slippers on a crumbling cake of adobe above the fathomless dust of the roadway. Her face, although annoyed and discontented, was pretty, and her light dress and slim figure were suggestive of a certain superior condition.
The man's manner at once softened with Western courtesy. He swung his broad-brimmed hat from his head, and bent his body with the ceremoniousness of the country ball-room. “I reckon the lady had better come up to the shanty out o' the dust and sun till we kin help you get these things fixed,” he said to the driver. “I'll send round by the road for your hoss, and have one of mine fetch up your wagon.”
“Is it far?” asked the girl, slightly acknowledging his salutation, without waiting for her companion to reply.
“Only a step this way,” he answered, motioning to the field of wheat beside her.
“What in THERE? I never could go in there,” she said, decidedly.
“It's a heap shorter than by the road, and not so dusty. I'll go with you, and pilot you.”
The young girl cast a vexed look at her companion as the probable cause of all this trouble, and shook her head. But at the same moment one little foot slipped from the adobe into the dust again. She instantly clambered back with a little feminine shriek, and ejaculated: “Well, of all things!” and then, fixing her blue annoyed eyes on the stranger, asked impatiently, “Why couldn't I go there by the road 'n the wagon? I could manage to hold on and keep in.”
“Because I reckon you'd find it too pow'ful hot waitin' here till we got round to ye.”
There was no doubt it was very hot; the radiation from the baking roadway beating up under her parasol, and pricking her cheekbones and eyeballs like needles. She gave a fastidious little shudder, furled her parasol, gathered her skirts still tighter, faced about, and said, “Go on, then.” The man slipped backwards into the ranks of stalks, parting them with one hand, and holding out the other as if to lead her. But she evaded the invitation by holding her tightly-drawn skirt with both hands, and bending her head forward as if she had not noticed it. The next moment the road, and even the whole outer world, disappeared behind them, and they seemed floating in a choking green translucent mist.