er had made the fire and begun his supper
preparations must be within call. But no answer came. Meantime the
night had deepened; there was no moon; the taller shrubs, aspiring to
tree proportions, made a tangle of shadow.

'He has probably gone off to picket his horse,' said Helen's father.
'Nothing could be more natural.'

Helen, more matter-of-fact and less given to theorizing, looked about
her curiously. She found a tin cup; there was no bed, no pack, no
other sign to tell who their neighbour might be. Close by the spot
where she had set down the frying-pan she noted a second spring.
Through an open space in the stunted desert growth the trail came in
from the north. Glancing northward she saw for the first time the
outline of a low hill. She stepped quickly to her father's side and
once more laid her hand on his arm.

'What is it?' he asked, his voice sharpening at her sudden grip.

'It's--it's spooky out here,' she said.

He scoffed. 'That's a silly word. In a natural world there is no
place for the supernatural.' He grew testy. 'Can I ever teach you,
Helen, not to employ words utterly meaningless?'

But Helen was not to be shaken.

'Just the same, it is spooky. I can feel it. Look there.' She
pointed. 'There is a hill. There will be a little ring of hills. In
the centre of the basin they make would be the pool. And you know what
we heard about it before we left San Juan. This whole country is
strange, somehow.'

'Strange?' he queried challengingly. 'What do you mean?'

She had not relaxed her hand on his arm. Instead, her fingers
tightened as she suddenly put her face forward and whispered defiantly:

'I mean _spooky_!'

'Helen,' he expostulated, 'where did you get such ideas?'

'You heard the old Indian legends,' she insisted, not more than half
frightened but conscious of an eerie influence of the still loneliness
and experiencing the first shiver of excitement as she stirred her own
fancy. 'Who knows but there is some foundation for them?'

He snorted his disdain and scholarly contempt.

'Then,' said Helen, resorting to argument, 'where did that fire come
from? Who made it? Why has he disappeared like this?'

'Even you,' said her father, quick as always to join issue where sound
argument offered itself as a weapon, 'will hardly suppose that a spook
eats bacon and drinks coffee,'

'The--the ghost,' said Helen, with a humorous glance in her eyes,
'might have whisked him