One afternoon she rode down to the alfalfa-fields, round them, and back up to the spillway of the lower lake, where a group of mesquite-trees, owing to the water that seeped through the sand to their roots, had taken on bloom and beauty of renewed life.  Under these trees there was shade enough to make a pleasant place to linger.  Madeline dismounted, desiring to rest a little.  She liked this quiet, lonely spot.  It was really the only secluded nook near the house.  If she rode down into the valley or out to the mesa or up on the foothills she could not go alone.  Probably now Stillwell or Nels knew her whereabouts.  But as she was comparatively hidden here, she imagined a solitude that was not actually hers.

Her horse, Majesty, tossed his head and flung his mane and switched his tail at the flies.  He would rather have been cutting the wind down the valley slope.  Madeline sat with her back against a tree, and took off her sombrero.  The soft breeze, fanning her hot face, blowing strands of her hair, was refreshingly cool.  She heard the slow tramp of cattle going in to drink.  That sound ceased, and the grove of mesquites appeared to be lifeless, except for her and her horse.  It was, however, only after moments of attention that she found the place was far from being dead.  Keen eyes and ears brought reward.  Desert quail, as gray as the bare earth, were dusting themselves in a shady spot.  A bee, swift as light, hummed by.  She saw a horned toad, the color of stone, squatting low, hiding fearfully in the sand within reach of her whip.  She extended the point of the whip, and the toad quivered and swelled and hissed.  It was instinct with fight.  The wind faintly stirred the thin foliage of the mesquites, making a mournful sigh.  From far up in the foothills, barely distinguishable, came the scream of an eagle.  The bray of a burro brought a brief, discordant break.  Then a brown bird darted down from an unseen perch and made a swift, irregular flight after a fluttering winged insect.  Madeline heard the sharp snapping of a merciless beak.  Indeed, there was more than life in the shade of the mesquites.

Suddenly Majesty picked up his long ears and snorted.  Then Madeline heard a slow pad of hoofs.  A horse was approaching from the direction of the lake.  Madeline had learned to be wary, and, mounting Majesty, she turned him toward the open.  A moment later she felt glad of her caution, for, looking back between the trees, she saw Stewart leading a horse into the grove.  She would as lief have met a guerrilla as this cowboy.

Majesty had broken into a trot when a shrill whistle rent the air.  The horse leaped and, wheeling so swiftly that he nearly unseated Madeline, he charged back straight for the mesquites.  Madeline spoke to him, cried angrily at him, pulled with all her strength upon the bridle, but was helplessly unable to stop him.  He whistled a piercing blast.  Madeline realized then that Stewart, his old master, had called him and that nothing could turn him.  She gave up trying, and attended to the urgent need of intercepting mesquite boughs that Majesty thrashed into motion.  The horse thumped into an aisle between the trees and, stopping before Stewart, whinnied eagerly.