Mary smiled faintly but it was evident that she was still thinking of the past, when she had been a little girl with golden curls that hung to her waist; a wonderfully pretty, wistful little girl. When she spoke, she said, “It’s only natural that Jerry should call me ‘Little Sister.’ Our mothers were like sisters when they were girl brides. I’ve told you how they both came from the East just as we have. My mother met Dad in Bisbee where he was a mining engineer, and Jerry’s mother taught a little desert school over near the Newcomb ranch. She didn’t teach long though, for that very first vacation she married Jerry’s cowboy father. After that Mother and Mrs. Newcomb were good friends, naturally, being brides and neighbors.”
Dora laughed. “Twenty-five miles apart wouldn’t be called close neighbors in Sunnybank-on-the-Hudson where I come from,” she said.
Mary, not heeding the interruption, kept on. “When Jerry and I were little, we were playmates. I spent days at the ranch sometimes,” her sweet face was very sad as she ended with, “until Mother died when I was eight.”
“Then you came East to boarding-school and became like a sister to me,” Dora said tenderly. “Oh, Mary, when you came West to be with your dear sick dad, I wonder if you know what it meant to me to be allowed to come with you.”
“I know what it means to me to have you, Dodo, so I ’spect it means the same to you,” was the affectionate reply.
For a time the girls cantered along in thoughtful silence. The rutty road was leading up toward the tableland on which stood the now nearly deserted old mining-town of Gleeson.
Far below them the desert valley stretched many miles southward to the Mexican border. The girls could see a distant blue haze that was the smoke from the Douglas copper smelters.
The late afternoon sun lay in floods of silver light on the sandy road ahead of them. It was very still. Not a sound was to be heard. Now and then a rabbit darted past silently.
“How peaceful this hour is on the desert,” Mary began, glancing at her friend who was riding so close at her side. Noticing that Dora was deep in thought, she asked lightly, “Won’t you say it out loud?”
“Why, of course. I was just wondering why Jerry hurried us away so fast from Lucky Loon’s rock house.”