“Why, my own mother’s name! I’m glad of that. Maybe she wouldn’t have suffered. Anyway, you know she doesn’t now. My father says that though our mother was so very, very happy on this earth, she is far happier now, with God.”
“Dear little comforter, so I try to believe of my own daughter,” said the woman, laying her hand on Carlota’s head.
“Was that her cactus?”
“Yes. She set it here. Her father planted the tree, which a brakeman brought her from a distant station. There were other things here, too, but they are gone. At first, I felt too desolate to care for them, and, when I had rallied so that I could, it was too late. Yet since it was here that she had made her garden it was here I had her put to rest.”
Carlota looked curiously at the stones. Away off in the distance, also, she could see beside the track another of the dead cattle which had so frightened her while on the hand-car. Mrs. Burnham noticed the glance and answered it:
“We had to put the tule reeds as a precaution against the coyotes.”
The girl shivered and exclaimed:
“How dreadful! Yet the stones don’t make any difference. The dear God knows about her, just the same. And—and—the cactus is very beautiful.”
“Yes, dear, yes. ‘The cactus is very beautiful.’ There is no life so dark or barren but may have its cactus bloom. Now since you have told me all about yourself I’ll tell you what is needful you should know about this Burnham family. It will do for the ‘story’ that Teddy is always begging.”
She smiled upon the little man who now approached, with his fat hands full of a rare yellow blossom which he offered to Carlota.