“Will you be my wife?”
“Yes, sir; I meant to be all the time.”
The contract having been properly sealed, Lombard said, with a countenance curiously divided between a tragical expression and a smile of fatuous complacency, “There was a clear case of poetical justice in your being left behind in the desert to-night. To see the lights of the train disappearing, leaving you alone in the midst of desolation, gave you a touch of my feeling on being rejected this afternoon. Of all leavings behind, there's none so miserable as the experience of the rejected lover.”
“Poor fellow! so he should n't be left behind. He shall be conductor of the train,” she said, with a bewitching laugh. His response was not verbal.
“How cold the wind is!” she said.
“Shall I build you another wigwam?”
“No; let us exercise a little. You whistle 'The Beautiful Blue Danube,' and we'll waltz. This desert is the biggest, jolliest ball-room floor that ever was, and I dare say we shall be the first to waltz on it since the creation of the world. That will be something to boast of when we get home. Come, let's dedicate the Great American Desert to Terpsichore.”
They stepped out from among the ruins of their sagebrush booth upon a patch of hard, bare earth close to the railroad track. Lombard puckered his lips and struck up the air, and off they went with as much enthusiasm as if inspired by a first-class orchestra. Round and round, to and fro, they swept until, laughing, flushed, and panting, they came to a stop.
It was then that they first perceived that they were not without a circle of appreciative spectators. Sitting like statues on their sniffing, pawing ponies, a dozen Piute Indians encircled them. Engrossed with the dance and with each other, they had not noticed them as they rode up, attracted from their route by this marvelous spectacle of a pale-face squaw and brave engaged in a solitary war dance in the midst of the desert.
At sight of the grim circle of centaurs around them Miss Dwyer would have fainted but for Lombard's firm hold.