nto her care-free eyes and
unreproachful face, his heart rose again in a great sigh of relief.
"That's the way a tenderfoot always feels about a sand-storm," she said.
"Well, we sure gave you some nice theatrical effects, didn't we? It's
the biggest I've seen for many a long day. But you were bound to see
something like that before you went away." She spoke with a fatalism
approaching Bob Flick's. "The desert never lets you go and forget her."
Her eyes dreamed a moment.

"She's like you in that, Pearl. My heavens! I wish you could see
yourself this morning. Beautiful ain't the word."

"Am I beautiful, Rudolf?" She lifted her head from his shoulder and
looked at him with a soft, childlike expression, as if longing for his
praise.

"I guess you know it," he said adoringly, stroking her shining black
hair, "but if you weren't, if you were as ugly as sin, it wouldn't make
any difference, you'd get us all just the same. All women like you got
to do is to look at a man and he'll follow you like a sheep. I don't
know what it is, magnetism or something."

"But I'm glad I'm not as ugly as sin," she murmured, in smiling content.
"And I'm glad you're not, too." She reached up her arm and touched his
hair caressingly. "I love that little touch of reddish gold in your
hair, and, yes, just that sprinkling of gray, and I love your blue eyes.
I can't bear dark men. I am so dark myself."

"You sure are, Pearl, thank the Lord! I never was very poetic, but I
never see one of these desert nights sparkling with their big stars,
twice as big as natural, that I don't think of you."

She smiled, delighted at his praise.

"But, goodness!" he went on, "when ain't I thinking of you? I tell you,
you been on my mind steady these last few days. Your Pop was so dead
sure when I talked to him that you'd have nothing more to do with me
that it got to worrying me, and I thought maybe you'd hold it against me
that I hadn't told you about--about my being already tied up." He
scanned her face as if fearful of seeing it cloud and change.

It did. The laughter faded from her eyes, her brow darkened. "I wish you
had told me," she said, "then I'd been a little better prepared for Pop
and Bob; but I guess they got as good as they gave."

"I know I ought to have told you, Pearl," he said miserably, "and I
meant to, honey, but"--gathering her more closely in his arms--"I just
couldn't spoil those first few days; and, anyway, you drove everything
but yo