en you've ridden as far as I have," said Starr, "you'll know it's a
rest to get down and travel afoot for a few miles." He might have added
that it would have been a rest had he not been hampered by those
high-heeled riding boots, but consideration for her mental ease did not
permit him to mention it. He said no more, but started the goats ahead of
him and kept them moving in a straight line for Sunlight Basin. As
before, Rabbit followed slavishly in his footsteps, nose dropped to the
angle of placid acceptance, ears twitching forward and back so that he
would lose no slightest sound.

Helen May fell again under the spell of the desert and the moon. Starr,
walking steadily through the white-lighted barrenness with his shadow
always moving like a ghost before him, fitted once more into the desert.
Again she repeated mentally the words of the song:

Let the night-winds touch thy brow
With the breath of my burning sigh,
And melt thee to hear the vow
Of a love that shall not die!

Till the sun grows cold,
And the stars are old,
And the leaves of the Judgment Book unfold!

And now the lines sung themselves through her brain with the memory of
Starr's voice. But Starr did not sing again, though Helen May, curious to
know if her thoughts held any power over him, gazed intently at his back
and willed him to sing. He did not look back at her, even when she
finally descended weakly to the more direct influence of humming the air
softly--but not too softly for him to hear.

Starr paid no attention whatever. He seemed to be thinking deeply--but he
did not seem to be thinking of Helen May, nor of desert love songs. Helen
May continued to watch him, but she was piqued at his calm indifference.
Why, she told herself petulantly, he paid more attention to those goats
than he did to her--and one would think, after that song and that
look.... But there she stopped, precipitately retreating from the thought
of that look.

He was a queer fellow, she told herself with careful tolerance and a
little condescension. A true product of the desert; as changeable and as
sphynxlike and as impossible from any personal, human standpoint. Look
how beautiful the desert could be, how terribly uplifting and calm
and--and big. Yet to-morrow it might be either a burning waste of heat
and sand and bare rock, or it might be a howling waste of wind and sand
(if one of those sand storms came up). To herself she called him the Man
of the Desert, and she