Against his will the engineer paused and drew close
to the window. “Well?”
“Why don’t you call on Miss Worth?
Perhaps—”
But Willard Holmes fled. And yet that which Burk
suggested in jest was exactly what Willard Holmes
had already determined in his own mind to do.
The engineer had not seen Barbara since the conclusion
of the South Central deal and he was continually asking
himself how the girl would look upon his part in that
transaction, or rather his failure to take a part
in it. Barbara’s frank confession, when
she had asked him to forgive her for blaming him because
of the Seer’s dismissal that they might start
square, had put their friendship upon such a ground
that the man felt guilty in not confessing at once
to her how he had aided Greenfield and Burk in their
effort to trap her father. He could not shake
off the conviction that she would undoubtedly look
upon his attitude as being what she had called untrue
to the work—the one thing she had declared
she could not forgive. Would she forgive him?
She had been so interested in his work, and the engineer
was beginning to realize how very much this meant to
him. At the Worth home the engineer learned from
the Indian woman that Barbara had left Kingston that
morning to visit her father in his camp in the South
Central District. She had gone with Texas Joe
in the buckboard and they had taken her saddle horse,
El Capitan.
When would La Senorita return? Ynez did not know.
GATHERED AT BARBARA’S COURT.
Barbara’s trip to the South Central District
was full of interest. Riding with Texas Joe in
a light buckboard drawn by a span of lively broncos
with El Capitan leading behind, she was as merry as
a school-girl out for a long-talked-of holiday.
The dark-faced old plainsman, whose iron will and
marvelous endurance had brought his companions and
the baby safely out of that land of death years before,
turned often to look at her now while his keen eyes,
dark still under their grizzly brows, were soft with
fond regard, and his voice, gentle and drawling as
ever, was filled with tender affection. Under
his drooping gray mustache, black once, his slow smile
came in the ready answer of full sympathy with her
mood.
Eager as ever to know all about the work of reclaiming
her Desert, the young woman plied him with questions
and Texas exerted himself to recall scenes and incidents
of which he had not told her before. He reviewed
the work from that first survey to the present with
vivid pictures of life in the camps, in the towns,
or on the trail, with construction gangs and grading
crews or freighters’ outfits, and the glimpses
of toil and hardship, discomforts and suffering lost
none of their reality in the dry humor of his words.
Texas Joe was of that sort who habitually laugh at
hardships, who, indeed, could not otherwise live in
the wild lands they helped to tame. Nor did the
