was delightfully cool. Stars shone
white in a velvet sky. The dry wind from mountain and desert blew in
their faces. Pan halted at the steps of the hotel.

"Blink, I'm going to turn in. Call for me in the morning. I can't
tell you how glad I am that I ran into you boys. And you, too, Brown.
I'd like to see more of you."

They shook hands and parted. Pan entered the hotel, and sat a while in
the bare smoky lobby, where sharp-eyed men and women passed him by with
one look at his cowboy attire. They were seeking bigger game. Pan
experienced a strange excitation in the hour, in the place.

When he went to his room he was not sleepy. "Lucky to meet those
boys," he soliloquized, as he undressed. "Now to find
Dad--Mother--Alice! Lord, I hope all's well with them. But I've a
feeling it isn't.... And Lucy! I wonder will she be here too. Will
she recognize me? I'll bet a million she does. Funny about Dick
Hardman. Never knew me. Didn't he look, though? ... And that girl
Louise. She had to laugh and talk all the time to hide the sadness of
her face.... At that, she's too good for Dick Hardman.... I'll bet
another million he and I clash again."

Pan was up bright and early, enjoying the keen desert air, and the vast
difference between Marco at night and at dawn. The little spell of
morbid doubt and worry that had settled upon him did not abide in the
clear rosy light of day. Hope and thrill resurged in him.

Blinky and his partner soon appeared, and quarreled over which should
carry Pan's baggage out to their quarters. Pan decidedly preferred the
locality to that he had just left. The boys had a big tent set up on a
framework of wood, an open shed which they used as a kitchen, and a big
corral. The site was up on a gradual slope, somewhat above the town,
and rendered attractive by a small brook and straggling cedars. They
had a Mexican cook who was known everywhere as Lying Juan. Pan grasped
at once that he would have a lot of fun with Juan.

The boys talked so fast they almost neglected to eat their breakfast.
They were full of enthusiasm, which fact Pan could not but see was
owing to his arrival. It amused him. Moran, like many other cowboys,
had always attributed to Pan a prowess and character he felt sure were
undeserved. Yet it touched him.

"Wal, ole-timer, we'll rustle now," finally said Moran. "We've got
aboot fifty broomies out heah in a canyon. We'll drive 'em in today,
an' al