A day or two after Joyce's visit, Harry called the dog—she had shortened Othello to 'Thello by this time—and went down to the side of the hundred and sixty where Rob was fencing. Having so little to occupy her time, she frequently went out to walk in the afternoon, and joined her brother on her way home; but this was the first time she had gone down so early, and she found the brush, under the afternoon sun, a very different place from what it had looked from the shade of the quaking aspens.
Out in the brush there was no shade; even the largest clumps of sage, some as high as her head, gave little refuge from the glare of the sun. The desert, lying silent in the sunshine and heat, seemed to fill the visible universe, and to absorb all significance from the tiny human motes that inhabited it. What, Harry asked herself, could Rob do singlehanded against that inert opponent?
As she watched him bore one hole after another, driving the post-hole digger down through the gravel and earth, repeating monotonously the same motions, never resting, seldom speaking, pausing only to pour a drink of water down his throat or to wipe the sweat from his face with his torn sleeve, he seemed to her to have become a helpless automaton that had been wound up and set going for the amusement of some invisible spectator.
Harry was discovering that the West was very different from the picturesque idea she had had of it. Her part in it, too, was not the picturesque part she had thought to play. Harry saw the West only from its unromantic exterior; not—as Rob was seeing it—as the foundation for as great a romance as the world has ever seen: the transforming of the waste places of the earth into a garden of plenty.
If Rob had only told her of the dreams and plans that inspired him—but Rob was no talker. Now, as Harry watched him, she felt only the vague discomfort of pity for his overwhelming task.
The heat made her sick, the glare tortured her eyes; she was afraid of the lizards and horned toads that darted across the sand about her; but if she went back to the tent she knew that she would soon become lonely and homesick. She decided to take a short walk. Looking over her shoulder toward the foothills, she frowned questioningly.
"Rob, who is that up there?"
"Hey?" Rob straightened himself laboriously and glanced in the direction in which she pointed.
As yet no sheep had bothered them. One or two flocks had come down from the foothills on their way across to the reserve, but Rob had warned them off. Seeing that their favorite bedding ground had been filed on, the herders had pushed on to the "scab" land.
"Aren't those sheep?" asked Harry.