f way down on the
southern edge of Arizona. It was still hot down there--hot as blazes--it
was about the first of September--and the rattlesnakes and the scorpions
were still as active as crickets. I knew a chap that had a cattle outfit
near the Mexican border, so I dropped in on him one day and stayed two
weeks. You see, he was lonely. Had a passion for theatres and hadn't
seen a play for five years. My second-hand gossip was rather a godsend.
But finally I got tired of talking about Mary Mannering, and decided to
start north again. He bade me good-by on a little hill near his place.
'See here!' he said suddenly, looking toward the west. 'If you go a
trifle out of your way you'll strike Los Pinos, and I wish you would.
It's a little bit of a dump of the United Copper Company's, no good, I'm
thinking, but the fellow in charge is a friend of mine. He's got his
wife there. They're nice people--or used to be. I haven't seen them for
ten years. They say he drinks a little--well, we all do. Maybe you could
write me how she--I mean, how he is getting on?' And he turned red. I
saw how the land lay, and as a favor to him I said I would.

"It was eighty miles away, and I drifted in there one night on top
of a tired cow-horse just at sundown. You know how purple--violet,
really--those desert evenings are. There was violet stretching away
as far as I could see, from the faint violet at my stirrups to the
deep, almost black violet of the horizon. Way off to the north I
could make out the shadow of some big hills that had been ahead of
me all day. The town, what there was of it, lay in a little gully.
Along its single street there were a few lights shining like small
yellow flowers. I asked my way of a Mexican, and he showed me up to
where the Whitneys--that name will do as well as any--lived, in a
decent enough sort of bungalow, it would seem, above the gully. He
left me there, and I went forward and rapped at the door. Light shone
from between the cracks of a near-by shutter, and I could hear voices
inside--a man's voice mostly, hoarse and high-pitched. Then a Chinaman
opened the door for me and I had a look inside, into a big living-room
beyond. It was civilized all right enough, pleasantly so to a man
stepping out of two days of desert and Mexican adobes. At a glance I
saw the rugs on the polished floor, and the Navajo blankets about,
and a big table in the centre with a shaded lamp and magazines in
rows; but the man in riding-c