s sophisticated palate. His hand encountered
Estrella's letter. He drew it out and opened it.

"Dear Buck," it read, "I am going away. I tried to be good, but I
can't. It's too lonesome for me. I'm afraid of the horses and the
cattle and the men and the desert. I hate it all. I tried to make you
see how I felt about it, but you couldn't seem to see. I know you'll
never forgive me, but I'd go crazy here. I'm almost crazy now. I
suppose you think I'm a bad woman, but I am not. You won't believe
that. Its' true though. The desert would make anyone bad. I don't
see how you stand it. You've been good to me, and I've really tried,
but it's no use. The country is awful. I never ought to have come.
I'm sorry you are going to think me a bad woman, for I like you and
admire you, but nothing, NOTHING could make me stay here any longer."
She signed herself simply Estrella Sands, her maiden name.

Buck Johnson stood staring at the paper for a much longer time than was
necessary merely to absorb the meaning of the words. His senses,
sharpened by the stress of the last sixteen hours, were trying mightily
to cut to the mystery of a change going on within himself. The phrases
of the letter were bald enough, yet they conveyed something vital to
his inner being. He could not understand what it was.

Then abruptly he raised his eyes.

Before him lay the desert, but a desert suddenly and miraculously
changed, a desert he had never seen before. Mile after mile it swept
away before him, hot, dry, suffocating, lifeless. The sparse
vegetation was grey with the alkali dust. The heat hung choking in the
air like a curtain. Lizards sprawled in the sun, repulsive. A
rattlesnake dragged its loathsome length from under a mesquite. The
dried carcass of a steer, whose parchment skin drew tight across its
bones, rattled in the breeze. Here and there rock ridges showed with
the obscenity of so many skeletons, exposing to the hard, cruel sky the
earth's nakedness. Thirst, delirium, death, hovered palpable in the
wind; dreadful, unconquerable, ghastly.

The desert showed her teeth and lay in wait like a fierce beast. The
little soul of man shrank in terror before it.

Buck Johnson stared, recalling the phrases of the letter, recalling the
words of his foreman, Jed Parker. "It's too lonesome for me," "I'm
afraid," "I hate it all," "I'd go crazy here," "The desert would
make anyone bad," "The country is awful." And th