istory is not interesting. As time fled to the monotonous clink
of coins over the bar he set up in the frame shack that faced the desert
trail, Ladron's importance in Lamo was divided by six.

The other dispensers had not come together; they had appeared as the
needs of the population seemed to demand--and all had flourished.

Lamo's other buildings had appeared without ostentation. There were
twenty of them. A dozen of the twenty, for one reason or another, need
receive no further mention. Of the remaining few, one was occupied by
Sheriff Gage; two others by stores; one answered as an office and
storage-room for the stage company; and still another was distinguished
by a crude sign which ran across its weather-beaten front, bearing the
legend: "Lamo Eating-House." The others were private residences.

Lamo's buildings made some pretense of aping the architecture of
buildings in other towns. The eating-house was a two-story structure,
with an outside stairway leading to its upper floor. It had a flat roof
and an adobe chimney. Its second floor had been subdivided into
lodging-rooms. Its windows were small, grimy.

Not one of Lamo's buildings knew paint. The structures, garish husks of
squalor, befouled the calm, pure atmosphere, and mocked the serene
majesty of nature.

For, beginning at the edge of "town," a contrast to the desert was
presented by nature. It was a mere step, figuratively, from that land
from which came the whisper of death, to a wild, virgin section where the
hills, the green-brown ridges, the wide sweeps of plain, and the cool
shadows of timber clumps breathed of the promise, the existence, of life.

To Barbara Morgan, seated at one of the east windows of the Lamo
Eating-House--in the second story, where she could look far out into the
desert--the contrast between the vivid color westward and the dun and
dead flatness eastward, was startling. For she knew her father had
entered the desert on his way to Pardo, on some business he had not
mentioned; and the whispered threat that the desert carried was borne to
her ears as she watched.

On a morning, two days before, Morgan had left the Rancho Seco for Pardo.
The girl had watched him go with a feeling--almost a conviction--that she
should have kept him at home. She had not mentioned to him that she had a
presentiment of evil, for she assured herself that she should have
outgrown those puerile impulses of the senses. And yet, having watched
him depa