re examining her closely. She looked at them in a swift side
glance that seemed to gather all their eyes to hers. Then, satisfied
that she possessed the universal admiration, she returned the full
force of her attention to the man before her.

"Now you give me your trunk checks," he was saying, "and then we'll go
right over and get married."

"Oh!" she gasped.

"That's right, ain't it?" he demanded.

"Yes, I suppose so," she agreed faintly.

A little subdued, she followed him to the clergyman's house, where, in
the presence of Goodrich, the storekeeper, and the preacher's wife, the
two were united. Then they mounted the buckboard and drove from town.

Senor Johnson said nothing, because he knew of nothing to say. He
drove skilfully and fast through the gathering dusk. It was a hundred
miles to the home ranch, and that hundred miles, by means of five
relays of horses already arranged for, they would cover by morning.
Thus they would avoid the dust and heat and high winds of the day.

The sweet night fell. The little desert winds laid soft fingers on
their checks. Overhead burned the stars, clear, unflickering, like
candles. Dimly could be seen the horses, their flanks swinging
steadily in the square trot. Ghostly bushes passed them; ghostly rock
elevations. Far, in indeterminate distance, lay the outlines of the
mountains. Always, they seemed to recede. The plain, all but
invisible, the wagon trail quite so, the depths of space--these flung
heavy on the soul their weight of mysticism. The woman, until now bolt
upright in the buckboard seat, shrank nearer to the man. He felt
against his sleeve the delicate contact of her garment and thrilled to
the touch. A coyote barked sharply from a neighbouring eminence, then
trailed off into the long-drawn, shrill howl of his species.

"What was that?" she asked quickly, in a subdued voice.

"A coyote--one of them little wolves," he explained.

The horses' hoofs rang clear on a hardened bit of the alkali crust,
then dully as they encountered again the dust of the plain. Vast,
vague, mysterious in the silence of night, filled with strange
influences breathing through space like damp winds, the desert took
them to the heart of her great spaces.

"Buck," she whispered, a little tremblingly. It was the first time she
had spoken his name.

"What is it?" he asked, a new note in his voice.

But for a time she did not reply. Only the contact against his sleev