But Imogene was not tired enough either to sit still or to sleep. She got up and walked restlessly round the camp. Known problems and unknown longings were stirring uneasily in her consciousness.
She stood at the edge of the field where the long rows of cotton plants, freshly watered, grew rank and green in the first intense heat of summer. There was a full moon to-night—a hazy, sleepy full moon with dust blown across its face creeping up over the eastern desert.
Just a little while ago and it was all desert. Two years ago when they first came this cotton field was uneven heaps of blown sand, desert cactus, and mesquite—barren and forbidding as a nightmare of thirst and want. It had taken a year's work and nearly all their meagre capital to level it and dig the water ditches. And the next year—that was last year—the crop was light and the price low. They had barely paid their debts and saved a few hundred for their next crop. Now that was gone, and with it six hundred, the last dollar she could borrow at the bank. Just how they were going to manage the rest of the summer she did not know. And worst of all were these vague but persistent rumours and warnings that the ranchers were somehow to be robbed of their crops.
She turned and walked back into the yard of the little shack and stood bareheaded looking at the moon, the desert wind in her face. Another summer of heat was coming swiftly now. She had lived through two seasons of that terrific heat when the sun blazed all day, day after day, and the thermometer climbed and climbed until it touched the 130 mark. And all these two years had been spent here at this shack, with its dirt yard and isolation.
The desert had bit deeply into her consciousness. Even the heat, the wind-driven sand, the stillness, the aloneness of it had entered into her soul with a sort of fascination.
"I'm not sorry," she shut her hands hard and pressed her lips close together, "even if we do lose—but we must not lose! We can't go on in poverty, either here or over there. We must not lose—we must not!"
She turned her head sharply; something toward the road had moved; some figure had appeared a moment and then disappeared. A fear that was never wholly absent made her move toward the door of her own shack. A revolver hung on a nail there.
And then out on the night stole the singing, quivering note of a violin. Instantly the fear was gone, the tension past, and the tears for the first time in all the struggle slipped down her cheeks. She knew now that for weeks she had been hoping he would come again.
When the violin cords ceased to sing, Imogene clapped her hands warmly, and the fiddler rose from beside a mesquite bush and came toward her.
"I'm glad you brought it this time," she said as he approached and sat down on a box a few feet away. "That was the best music I have heard for years."