All at once she turned her back upon her visitor
and the tears of the years streamed down her impassive face.

"Don't mind me," she choked, after a minute. "I liked it real good, only
it kind of give me a turn." Then, after a second: "It's time t' eat. You
c'n wash outside after the men is done."

That, thought Margaret, had been the scheme of this woman's whole
life--"After the men is done!"

So, after all, the night was passed in safety, and a wonderful dawning
had come. The blue of the morning, so different from the blue of the
night sky, was, nevertheless, just as unfathomable; the air seemed
filled with straying star-beams, so sparkling was the clearness of the
light.

But now a mountain rose in the distance with heliotrope-and-purple
bounds to stand across the vision and dispel the illusion of the night
that the sky came down to the earth all around like a close-fitting
dome. There were mountains on all sides, and a slender, dark line of
mesquite set off the more delicate colorings of the plain.

Into the morning they rode, Margaret and the Boy, before Pop Wallis was
yet awake, while all the other men stood round and watched, eager,
jealous for the handshake and the parting smile. They told her they
hoped she would come again and sing for them, and each one had an
awkward word of parting. Whatever Margaret Earle might do with her
school, she had won seven loyal friends in the camp, and she rode away
amid their admiring glances, which lingered, too, on the broad shoulders
and wide sombrero of her escort riding by her side.

"Wal, that's the end o' him, I 'spose," drawled Long Bill, with a deep
sigh, as the riders passed into the valley out of their sight.

"H'm!" said Jasper Kemp, hungrily. "I reck'n _he_ thinks it's jes' th'
beginnin'!"

"Maybe so! Maybe so!" said Big Jim, dreamily.

The morning was full of wonder for the girl who had come straight from
an Eastern city. The view from the top of the mesa, or the cool, dim
entrance of a canon where great ferns fringed and feathered its walls,
and strange caves hollowed out in the rocks far above, made real the
stories she had read of the cave-dwellers. It was a new world.

The Boy was charming. She could not have picked out among her city
acquaintances a man who would have done the honors of the desert more
delightfully than he. She had thought him handsome in the starlight and
in the lantern-light the night before, but now that the morning shone
upon hi