old body, from which time had stripped
the flesh, leaving only a tenuous bark of muscle, was impervious to the
heat. In the growing glare he worked over a broken saddle, the
whitening reaches stretching out beyond him to where the mountains
waved in a clear blue line as if laid on with one wash of a saturated
paint brush. Courant was near him in the shadow of his horse, cleaning
a gun, sharp clicks of metal now and then breaking into the stillness.

As the hours passed the shadow of the wagon shrunk and the girl moved
with it till her back was pressed against the wheel. She was making a
calico jacket, and as she moved it the crisp material emitted low
cracklings. Each rustle was subdued and stealthy, dying quickly away
as if it were in conspiracy with the silence and did not want to
disturb it. Courant's back was toward her. He had purposely set his
face away, but he could hear the furtive whisperings of the stirred
calico. He was full of the consciousness of her, and this sound, which
carried a picture of her drooped head and moving hands, came with a
stealing unquiet, urgently intrusive and persistent. He tried to hold
his mind on his work, but his movements slackened, grew intermittent,
his ear attentive for the low rustling that crept toward him at
intervals like the effervescent approach of waves. Each time he heard
it the waves washed deeper to his inner senses and stole something from
his restraining will. For days the desert had been stealing from it
too. He knew it and was guarded and fearful of it, but this morning he
forgot to watch, forgot to care. His reason was drugged by the sound,
the stifled, whispering sound that her hands made moving the material
from which she fashioned a covering for her body.

He sat with his back turned to her, his hands loose on the gun, his
eyes fixed in an unseeing stare. He did not know what he looked at or
that the shadow of the horse had slipped beyond him. When he heard her
move his quietness increased to a trancelike suspension of movement,
the inner concentration holding every muscle in spellbound rigidness.
Suddenly she tore the calico with a keen, rending noise, and it was as
if her hands had seized upon and so torn the tension that held him.
His fists clinched on the gun barrel, and for a moment the mountain
line undulated to his gaze. Had they been alone, speech would have
burst from him, but the presence of the old man kept him silent. He
bowed his