Shouts and cheers of understanding burst from the crowd.
"It is for you that it is here," continued the young woman. "Will you go away now and come back in the morning—each man for what is his?"
"Si, si, Senorita! Gracias, Senorita!" Laughing, talking and gesticulating the crowd dissolved and moved away.
Before the dispersing laborers had passed beyond the circle of light
Barbara was kneeling beside Willard Holmes.
And when they would have taken the engineer to the hotel Barbara said
"No"; he must be taken to her home.
Texas had just finished dressing with rude surgery the wound in the engineer's shoulder, and Barbara—standing by the bedside—was looking down into the still face when Holmes slowly came back to consciousness. His opening eyes looked up full into the brown eyes that regarded him so kindly. For a moment neither spoke, but a slow flush of color crept into the girl's face.
By some strange freak of his half awakened intellectual faculties, Holmes was living over again the incident of his meeting Barbara on the desert the morning after her first arrival in Kingston. "Is it really you, or is it some new trick of this confounded desert?" he muttered. "I never saw a mirage like this before. I don't think the heat has affected my brain!"
To Barbara the words had the effect of suddenly blotting out all that had come between them and of putting them both back again to the day when they had "started square." So she answered as she had answered then: "I assure you that I am very substantial"—and added softly, "and I am here to stay, too."
"And you would never forgive one who was false to the work," muttered the engineer, and with the words his mind caught at the suggestion of the power that had enabled him to keep his seat in the saddle through the seemingly endless hours of torture, and he remembered everything up to the moment when he had handed the money to Barbara.
With an exclamation he tried to raise himself.