rought him quite close to Helen May, so
that she could have put her hand on his shoulder.

"Yes. It's wonderful--when it ain't terrible," he said, his voice low.

After a silent minute she answered him, in the hushed tone that seemed
most in harmony with the tremendous sweep of sky and that great stretch
of plain and bare mountain. "I see what you mean. It is terrible even
when it's most wonderful. But one little human alone with it would be--"

"Sh-sh." he whispered. "Listen a minute. Did you ever _hear_ a big
silence like this?"

"No," she breathed eagerly. "Sh-sh--"

At first there was nothing save the whisper of a breeze that stirred the
greasewood and then was still. Full in their faces the moon swung clear
of the mountains behind San Bonito and hung there, a luminous yellow ball
in the deep, star-sprinkled purple. Across the desert it flung a faint,
straight pathway in the sand. Rabbit gave a long sigh, turned his head to
look back at his master, and then stood motionless again. Far on a
hilltop a coyote pointed his nose to the moon and yap-yap-yapped, with a
shrill, long-drawn tremolo wail that made the girl catch her breath.
Behind them the nine goats moved closer together and huddled afraid
beside a clump of bushes. The little breeze whispered again. A night bird
called in a hurried, frightened way, and upon the last notes came the
eerie cry of a little night owl.

The girl's face was uplifted, delicately lighted by the moon. Her eyes
shone dark with those fluttering, sweet wraiths of thoughts which we may
not prison in speech, which words only deaden and crush into vapid
sentimentalism. Life, held in a great unutterable calm, seemed to lie out
there in the radiant, vague distance, asleep and smiling cryptically
while it slept.

Her eyes turned to Starr, whose name she did not know; who had twice come
riding out of the distance to do her some slight service before he rode
on into the distance that seemed so vast. Who was he? What petty round of
duties and pleasures made up his daily, intimate life? She did not know.
She did not feel the need of knowing.

Standing there with his thin face turned to the moon so that she saw,
clean-cut against the night, his strong profile; with one arm thrown
across the neck of his horse and his big hat tilted back so that she
could see the heavy, brown hair that framed his fine forehead; with the
look of a dreamer in his eyes and the wistfulness of the lonely on his
lip