"Wait till you see this sky at the dawn," he said. "It will burn red fire off there in the east like a hearth in a palace, and all this dome will glow like a great pink jewel set in gold. If you want a classy sky, there you have it! Nothing like it in the East!"
There was a strange mingling of culture and roughness in his speech. The girl could not make him out; yet there had been a palpitating earnestness in his description that showed he had felt the dawn in his very soul.
"You are—a—poet, perhaps?" she asked, half shyly. "Or an artist?" she hazarded.
He laughed roughly and seemed embarrassed. "No, I'm just a—bum! A sort of roughneck out of a job."
She was silent, watching him against the starlight, a kind of embarrassment upon her after his last remark. "You—have been here long?" she asked, at last.
"Three years." He said it almost curtly and turned his head away, as if there were something in his face he would hide.
She knew there was something unhappy in his life. Unconsciously her tone took on a sympathetic sound. "And do you get homesick and want to go back, ever?" she asked.
His tone was fairly savage now. "No!"
The silence which followed became almost oppressive before the Boy finally turned and in his kindly tone began to question her about the happenings which had stranded her in the desert alone at night.
So she came to tell him briefly and frankly about herself, as he questioned—how she came to be in Arizona all alone.