“But there is one thing you are mistaken about, father.  They did not hit me, to hurt you.  They hit me, to stop Dick Wayland.”

“Why, what difference can you make to Wayland?”

She hid her face on his shoulder.

“I love him,” she said.

When the German cook came in with the washed dishes, father and daughter still sat in the big arm chair; and you may depend on it, that flunky carried out to the ranch hands, guzzling over the evening paper in the bunk house, a proper report of a heart broken father and a repentant daughter; for when we look out on the world, do we see the world at all; or do we see the shadows of our own inner souls cast out on the passing things of life?

CHAPTER XX

A FAITH WORKABLE FOR MEN ON THE JOB

“The point is,” said Wayland, “though, we have driven out this nest of beauties, we have no guarantee another nest won’t take their place; and so we’re not much farther ahead than before, with the chances I’ll be called down for exceeding my duties.”

“And y’ll keep on bein’ where y’ were before till y’ get the Man Higher Up,” interrupted Matthews.

They had camped among the red firs where the Desert crossed the State Line and merged from cut rocks to broken timber.  It was seven weeks since they had set out from the Upper Mesas of the Rim Rocks, four weeks since they had left the saline pool.  Man and beast, fagged to the point of utter exhaustion, retraced steps slower than fresh hunters on an untried trail.  Also, going down, they had followed hard wherever fugitives led.  Coming back, they struck across to the Western Desert road, and travelled from belt to belt of the irrigation farms, with their orange-green cottonwood groves and bluish-green alfalfa fields and little match box houses stuck out of sight among peach orchards.  The parched-earth, burnt-oil smell gave place to the minty odor of hay in wind rows, with the cool water tang of the big irrigation ditch flowing liquid gold in the yellow August light.  One evening, Matthews looked back to the looming heat waving and writhing above the orange sands beneath a sky of lilac and topaz round a sunset flowing from a dull red ball of fire.  Far ahead, the edges of forested mountain cut the heat haze with opal winged light above what might have been peaks or clouds.

“’Tis beautiful, Wayland, y’r lone Desert world; but man alive, it’s sad!  Y’ call some the Painted Desert, don’t ye?  ’Tis like a painted woman, Wayland, vera beautiful, vera fair to look on an’ allurin’, but a’ out o’ perspective; an’ Wayland, the painted woman is always a bit lonely in the bottom o’ her soul spite o’ harsh laugh.  So is the Desert wi’ its harsh silence.  Those as like to be shrivelled up wi’ thirst, may have it!  A’m a plain man!”

Then one morning, the opal swimming above the smoke haze of the North shone,—­was it the shape of a cross?