by the road
for your hoss, and have one of mine fetch up your wagon."

"Is it far?" asked the girl, slightly acknowledging his salutation,
without waiting for her companion to reply.

"Only a step this way," he answered, motioning to the field of wheat
beside her.

"What in THERE? I never could go in there," she said, decidedly.

"It's a heap shorter than by the road, and not so dusty. I'll go with
you, and pilot you."

The young girl cast a vexed look at her companion as the probable cause
of all this trouble, and shook her head. But at the same moment one
little foot slipped from the adobe into the dust again. She instantly
clambered back with a little feminine shriek, and ejaculated: "Well,
of all things!" and then, fixing her blue annoyed eyes on the stranger,
asked impatiently, "Why couldn't I go there by the road 'n the wagon? I
could manage to hold on and keep in."

"Because I reckon you'd find it too pow'ful hot waitin' here till we got
round to ye."

There was no doubt it was very hot; the radiation from the baking
roadway beating up under her parasol, and pricking her cheekbones and
eyeballs like needles. She gave a fastidious little shudder, furled her
parasol, gathered her skirts still tighter, faced about, and said, "Go
on, then." The man slipped backwards into the ranks of stalks, parting
them with one hand, and holding out the other as if to lead her. But
she evaded the invitation by holding her tightly-drawn skirt with both
hands, and bending her head forward as if she had not noticed it. The
next moment the road, and even the whole outer world, disappeared behind
them, and they seemed floating in a choking green translucent mist.

But the effect was only momentary; a few steps further she found that
she could walk with little difficulty between the ranks of stalks, which
were regularly spaced, and the resemblance now changed to that of a long
pillared conservatory of greenish glass, that touched all objects with
its pervading hue. She also found that the close air above her head
was continually freshened by the interchange of currents of lower
temperature from below,--as if the whole vast field had a circulation of
its own,--and that the adobe beneath her feet was gratefully cool to
her tread. There was no dust, as he had said; what had at first half
suffocated her seemed to be some stimulating aroma of creation that
filled the narrow green aisles, and now imparted a strange vigor and
excitem