"Can we? Can we go, daddy?"
Jefferson Worth met Abe's look with a twinkle in the corner of his eye, but he only answered his eager daughter with a calm, "If you like."
They found the house with every window brilliantly lighted, and on the front porch, on opposite sides of the wide-open door, Texas and Pat standing to welcome them. From one room to another Barbara ran in laughing delight, followed by the three, who were perspiring in an agony of suspense while Jefferson Worth looked on. The cook stove was not in the parlor, nor was the piano—out of place. In the proper room Barbara even found her trunks. There was a supply of provisions in the pantry and kindlings even ready by the kitchen stove for the morning fire. If there were little irregularities here and there, Barbara, with graceful tact, did not see them but, to the delight of the three men, declared again and again that no woman could have done it better.
The climax came when she said that unless her father insisted she would not even return to the hotel that evening. Could not someone go for the hand luggage and Ynez? Breathless the three waited, and when Mr. Worth said he saw no reason why they should leave their own home for a hotel Tex and Pat could hold themselves no longer but made a wild run for the door.
When Barbara's "uncles" had returned with the Indian woman and the grips, Pat stood in the center of the living room and looked curiously about, an expression of wonder upon his battle-scarred Irish countenance. "Now don't that bate the divil! Tell me"—he faced the girl with mock severity—"fwhat's this ye've been doin' already?"
"Doing?" exclaimed Barbara, "I haven't been doing anything, Uncle Pat."
"Aw, go on, don't be tellin' me that. Aven Uncle Tex here can see that ye've changed ivery blissid thing in the place. 'Tis not the same, at all, an' afther us a-workin' our fingers to the bone to fix ut up. 'Tis quare. I know now that Tex hung that curtain there. Ye could have heard him swearin' a mile away, but ut's not that same curtain at all, at all. 'Tis mighty quare."
For an hour or more Barbara, at the piano, sang for them the simple songs they loved, while many a tired horseman, riding past on his way to his lonely desert shack or to some rough camp on the works, paused to listen to the sweet voice and to dream perhaps of the time that was to come when such sounds would no longer seem strange on the Desert.
When the hour came for Texas and Pat and Abe to go, and Barbara with shining eyes tried again to express her gratitude while insisting that they must always come to her home as to their own, the three felt that indeed they had their reward. And when later the girl kissed her father good night Jefferson Worth also knew in his lonely heart that he had done well.