She pushed a teasing lock of hair out of her eyes with one of her mud-splashed garden gloves. It left a ludicrous smudge across her cheek.
“Each time I leave this garden,” she complained, “I declare I won’t again. Not even for the Marshalls.” She bent over again to adjust a bottomless keg around a wind-whipped, moribund plant.
“Quite a keg plant!” he quizzed. “Raising anything else?”
“And the glory of the morning he does not see!” she exclaimed with theatric intent.
His eyes ran over the pink and purple lines of cord-trained vines which made floral screens for her tent. Free of the strings overhead, they rioted over the ramada, the second roof, of living boughs. He acknowledged their beauty. They gave grace to bare necessity; they denied the panting, thirsty desert just beyond.
He remembered his own ramada. Gerty had hated it, had complained of it so bitterly when she came home from New York that he had had it pulled down and replaced by a V roof of pine boards, glaring and ugly. Gerty was satisfied, for it was clean; she no longer felt that she lived in a squaw-house. Let the Indians have ramadas; there was no earthly reason she should. He had urged that the desert dwellers had valuable hints to give them. But what was a ramada to him, or anything else?
He nodded at Innes.
“They are doing so much better than the ones you planted at the office. I wonder if Sam doesn’t water them enough?” His mood was faultfinding. “Didn’t he water your roses while you were gone?”
“Oh, he waters enough,” smiled his sister. “But Sam’s not for progress. He won’t see the difference between watering and irrigating.”
“It looks like a train wreck, or a whipped prize-fighter, next day,” observed Hardin.