He found the table covered with the contents of the basket—sandwiches, tinned meat, and half a dozen odd little crocks filled with the most amazing Chinese delicacies. Tom Lee ate nothing, but smoked a tiny pipe of gold-mounted bamboo, which Claire filled and lighted for him. Nor did he talk at all, save to answer a direct question, leaving the burden of conversation to Murray and the girl. His eyes watched Murray sharply, however; perhaps he did not fail to note that while the red-headed medico was discreet enough to ask no questions regarding them, he also avoided all reference to himself.
"I expect to settle in Two Palms," said Murray suddenly, feeling that they were wondering about him even as he was about them. "For my health. I came here with two friends, and we may all become citizens of the desert for a time."
The girl's eyes went to her father, as though to seek from him permission to speak. But Tom Lee watched Murray through his pipe-smoke, and made no sign.
"It is a wonderful place," and the girl sighed a little. "Savage and——"
"Ah!" exclaimed Murray. "You must have blankets; these nights are cold. You can't use these horribly soiled ones in the bunks, Miss Lee."
"There is a suitcase strapped behind the car," spoke up Tom Lee. "Everything necessary is in it."
Murray went out to the car and began unstrapping the suitcase he found there. The sun had fallen behind the western buttes—purple-red peaks that seemed to jut out of the level desert floor, solid blocks of shadowed Tyrian now, that with the sunrise would betray the most delicate of greens and pinks, and that with noon would gleam savagely in the harshest and crudest of stark reds.
And here the green pear trees, five-year trees, silvered the sunset-reddened sand as though reflecting the pale whiteness of the sky that would darken soon into the deep blue of the spangled night. Murray paused and looked at it all, awed before the silence. Then came a crunch of sand and a voice behind him.
"It is the magic hour of the desert—this and the sunrise, yet each so different! I wonder that artists do not try to paint such things, instead of hills in the sun and the bald architecture of buildings! Here is the miracle, and they see it not."
Murray turned to the girl. "The miracle indeed, Clairedelune!" he said softly.