"I'm glad to see you, Bob," she said simply. "I've often thought of you. And you've come in at an interesting time. Dad turned loose his ray yesterday, and brought down one of the red machines. I guess Bill has told you—"
"Yes," the Doctor interrupted, "the th-th-th-thing had come sneaking around here once too often. I tried the tube on it and it fell about a mile up the creek. Funny thing about it. The red ship struck the ground, and then something left it and went b-b-b-b-back into the air!"
"Something like a bright blue balloon carried the thing up in the air," Ellen added. "It saved itself with that, just like a man wrecked in the air uses a parachute. But it was not a man that sailed up under that ball of blue light! It was a queer twisting purple thing! I used the field glasses—"
"It's not m-m-m-men that fly the red ships," the Doctor said. "It's c-cre-cre-creatures of the upper air!"
We stepped up on the broad, shady verandah, and Bill and the Doctor stopped by the steps, comparing notes. Ellen gave me a welcome drink of icy water from the wind-cooled earthen olla hanging from the roof. Straight, and tanned, she looked very beautiful against the desert background. She was the same girl she had always been—bright, daring, and alluring. Neither she nor the Doctor seemed unduly excited over the astounding news they had just delivered.
The desert lay away to the eastward, undulating in the heat like a windswept lake. Gray or dully green with the yucca and manzanita upon it, it was sharply cut by the rich green mark of the wandering stream. Its vastness tired the eyes, like a limitless weird dead sea. North and south the mountains rose, gripping the plain in a grim and ancient grasp. The hills were still tinted with the blues and purples of the morning shades, save where some higher peak caught the sunlight and reflected it in a fiercer, redder gleam. Far in the north, above the nearer peaks, I made out the distantly mysterious, dull blue outline of Mocolynatal—the mountain of the hidden menace.
In such a wild and primitive setting, human civilization seemed a distant, unimportant issue. The menace of the desert, of naked nature, alone seemed real. No wild tale was incredible there.
And the wonderful girl before me, smiling, cool and resourceful, seemed to fit in with that rough scenery, seemed almost a part of it. Ellen was the kind of woman who can master her environment.
"Coming down here was a pretty severe change for a campus queen, wasn't it?" I asked her.
"The royal blood never flowed too freely in my veins," she said. "I rather like it here. The ore train from Durango brings the mail twice a week, and I read a lot. Then, I'm beginning to love the desert and the mountains. Sometimes I feel almost like worshipping old Mocolynatal. They say the Indians did."