He crossed the bridge over the main canal, left the fringe of cottonwood and willow, and turned across the open toward the Red Butte Ranch. The fiddle was under his arm. Then he saw a shack in the open field to the right of the road. It was one of those temporary structures of willow poles and arrow weed that serve for a house for the renter on the Mexican side. The setting moon was at its back, and the open doorway showed only as a darker splotch. He lifted the fiddle again. "Chinaboy, Jap, Hindu, Poor Man, Rich Man, Beggar Man or Mexican—I'll give you a serenade all the samee."
The gleeful melody had scarcely jigged its way into the desert night when, in the black splotch of the doorway, a figure appeared—a woman in a white nightdress. Swiftly Bob changed the jig tune into a real serenade, a clear, haunting, calling melody. The figure stood straight and motionless in the dark doorway as long as he could see. Someway he knew it was a white woman and that she was young.
He put the fiddle back in the bag and turned in his saddle to mark the location of the hut in his mind—there was a clump of eucalyptus trees just north of it. Yes, he would know the place, and he would learn tomorrow who lived there. That listening figure had caught his imagination.
But again he grinned into the night, ruefully this time as he remembered the disaster that had followed his last two experiences with this diabolical instrument of glee and grief.
"Oh, well," he shook his head determinedly and threw his leg across the saddle, "the first time was with a preacher; the second with a gun; now we'll give the lady a chance."
The fiddle and the figure in the doorway had stirred in Bob a lot of reflections. At twenty he had given up his music and most of the careless fun that went with it, because a sudden jolt had made him see that to win through he must fight and not fiddle. For eight years he had worked tremendously hard at half a dozen jobs across half a dozen states; and there had been plenty of fighting. But what had he won?—a job as a hardware clerk at twenty dollars a week.
"Oh, well"—he had learned to give the Mexican shrug of the shoulder—"twenty dollars in a land of opportunity is better than fifty where everything is already fixed."
That must be the Red Butte Ranch across yonder. He turned into the left-hand fork of the road.
"Hello, there!" A tall, rambling fellow rose up from the side of the road. "Are you the good Samaritan or merely one of the thieves?"
"Neither," replied Bob, guessing this was a messenger from the Red Butte, "but I work for both. Where is your balky tractor?"