s and such denizens of the desert. With a
certain instinct for preparing against the worst, she took a two-quart
canteen, such as soldiers carry, to the spring, and filled it and slung
it over her shoulder. She went to the cabin and made a couple of
sandwiches, and because she was not altogether inhuman she cut two
thick slices of bread, spread them lavishly with jam, and carried them
to Vic as a peace offering.

"I'm going to hunt those nasty brutes, Vic," she cried from a safe
distance. "Come here and get this jam sandwich, and lend me that stick
you've got. And if I don't get back by five, you start a fire."

"Where you going to look? If you couldn't see 'em from up there, I don't
see the use of hunting." Vic was taking long steps towards the sandwich,
and he stretched his sunburned face in that grin which might have made
him famous in comedy had fate not set him down before his present ignoble
task. "Yuh don't want to go far," he advised her perfunctorily. "We ought
to have a couple of saddle horses. Why don't yuh--"

"What would we feed them on? Besides we've got to save what money we've
got, Vic. We can walk till these insects grow wool enough to pay for
something to ride on."

"Hair, you mean. I can get a gentle horse from that Mexican kid, Luis. He
good as offered us the one--that I borrowed--" Vic was giving too much
attention to the jam sandwich to argue very coherently.

"There's that old Billy starting off again; you watch him, Vic. Don't let
him get a start, or goodness knows where he'll head for next. We can't
keep a horse, I tell you. We need all this grass for the goats."

"Oh, darn the goats!"

In her heart Helen May quite agreed with the sentiment, but she could not
consistently betray that fact to Vic. She therefore turned her back upon
him, walking down the trail that led out of the Basin to the main trail a
mile away, the trail which was the link connecting them with civilization
of a sort.

Here passed the depressed, dust-covered stage three times a week. Here,
in a macaroni box mounted on a post, they received and posted their
mail. Helen May had indulged herself in a subscription to the Los
Angeles daily paper that had always been left at their door every
morning, the paper which Peter had read hastily over his morning mush.
Every paper brought a pang of homesickness for the flower-decked city of
her birth, but she felt as though she could not have kept her sanity
without it. The full-pa