after the stage
had come and gone that he found the chance for a word with Melissy alone.

"Your father submitted my proposition, did he?" Bellamy said by way of
introducing the subject.

"Let's take a walk on it. I haven't been out of the house to-day," she
answered with the boyish downrightness sometimes uppermost in her.

Calling Jim, she left him in charge of the store, caught up a Mexican
sombrero, and led the way up the trail to a grove of live-oaks perched on
a bluff above. Below them stretched the plain, fold on fold to the blue
horizon edge. Close at hand clumps of cactus, thickets of mesquit,
together with the huddled adobe buildings of the ranch, made up the
details of a scene possible only in the sunburnt territory. The
palpitating heat quivered above the hot brown sand. No life stirred in the
valley except a circling buzzard high in the sky, and the tiny moving
speck with its wake of dust each knew to be the stage that had left the
station an hour before.

Melissy, unconscious of the charming picture she made, stood upon a rock
and looked down on it all.

"I suppose," she said at last slowly, "that most people would think this
pretty desolate. But it's a part of me. It's all I know." She broke off
and smiled at him. "I had a chance to be civilized. Dad wanted to send me
East to school, but I couldn't leave him."

"Where were you thinking of going?"

"To Denver."

Her conception of the East amused him. It was about as accurate as a New
Yorker's of the West.

"I'm glad you didn't. It would have spoiled you and sent you back just
like every other young lady the schools grind out."

She turned curiously toward him. "Am I not like other girls?"

It was on his tongue tip to tell her that she was gloriously different
from most girls he had known, but discretion sealed his lips. Instead, he
told her of life in the city and what it means to society women, its
emptiness and unsatisfaction.

His condemnation was not proof positive to her. "I'd like to go there for
myself some time and see. And anyhow it must be nice to have all the money
you want with which to travel," she said.

This gave him his opening. "It makes one independent. I think that's the
best thing wealth can give--a sort of spaciousness." He waited perceptibly
before he added: "I hope you have decided to be my partner in the mine."

"I've decided not to."

"I'm sorry. But why?"

"It's your mine. It isn't ours."

"That's nonsense. I