was one he had learned at some movie show, and in a
minute he broke into singing, "Hearts seem light, and life seems bright
in dreamy Chinatown." Starr, brooding up there above the boy, wished that
Luis might never be heavier of heart than now, when he went singing up
the path to the thick-walled adobe. He liked Luis.

The murmur of voices continued, and after awhile there came plaintively
up to Starr the sound of a guitar, and mingling with it the voice of Luis
singing a Spanish song. _La Golondrina_, it was, that melancholy song of
exile which Mexicans so love. Starr listened gloomily, following the
words easily enough in that still night air.

Away to the northwest there gleamed a brighter, more intimate star than
the constellation above. While Luis sang, the watcher in the rocks fixed
his eyes wistfully on that gleaming pin point of light, and wondered what
Helen May was doing. Her lighted window it was; her window that looked
down through the mouth of the Basin and out over the broken mesa land
that was half desert. Until then he had not known that her window saw so
far; though it was not strange that he could see her light, since he was
on the crest of a ridge higher than any other until one reached the bluff
that held Sunlight Basin like a pocket within its folds.

Luis finished the song, strummed a while, sang a popular rag-time,
strummed again and, so Starr explained his silence, went to bed. Estan
began again to talk, now and then lifting his voice, speaking earnestly,
as though he was arguing or protesting, or perhaps expounding a theory of
some sort. Starr could not catch the words, though he knew in a general
way the meaning of the tones Estan was using.

A new sound brought him to his knees, listening: the sound of a
high-powered engine being thrown into low gear and buzzing like angry
hornets because the wheels did not at once grip and thrust the car
forward. Sand would do that. While Starr listened, he heard the chuckle
of the car getting under way, and a subdued purring so faint that, had
there not been a slow, quiet breeze from that direction, the sound would
never have reached his ears at all. Even so, he had no more than
identified it when the silence flowed in and covered it as a lazy tide
covers a pebble in the moist sand.

Starr glanced down at the house, heard Estan still talking, and got
carefully to his feet. He thought he knew where the car had slipped in
the sand, and he made toward the p