Without another word she burst into tears, heart-breaking sobs, the more vehement because obviously she was trying to suppress them.  I stared at her, helpless with dismay, confronted for the first time with an emergency which seemed to paralyse rather than stimulate action.  Had I sympathised, had I presented any aspect other than that of the confounded idiot, she might have become hysterical.  Without doubt, my impassivity pulled her together.  The sobs ceased, and she said with a certain calmness—­

“I couldn’t help it.  You and your brother have this splendid ranch; you have experience, capital, everything looks so prosperous, and yet you are going—­behind.  And if that is the case, what is to become of us?”

“I dare say things will brighten up a bit.”

“Brighten up?” She laughed derisively.

“That’s the worst of it.  The brightness is appalling.  These hard, blue skies without a cloud in them, this everlasting sunshine—­how I loathe it!”

Again I became tongue-tied.

“Jim thinks it is Eden.  When he showed me that ugly hut, and his sickly fruit trees, and that terrible little garden where every flower seemed to be protesting against its existence, I had to make-believe that it was Eden to me.  Each day he goes off to his work, and he always asks the same question:  ’You won’t be lonesome, little woman, will you?’ and I answer, ‘No.’  But I am lonesome, so lonesome that I should have gone mad if I hadn’t found someone—­you—­to whom I could speak out.”

“I’m frightfully sorry,” I stammered.

“Thanks.  I know you are.  And your brother is sorry, and everybody else, too.  The women, my neighbours in the brush-hills, look at me with the same question in their eyes:  ‘What are you doing here?’ they say.

“How impertinent!”

“Pertinent, I call it.”

From that moment I regarded her with different eyes.  If she had brains to measure obstacles, she might surmount them, for brains in a new country are the one possession which adversity increases.

“Mrs. Misterton,” I said slowly, “you are in a tight place, and I won’t insult your intelligence by calling it by a prettier name; but you can pull yourself and Jim out of it, and I believe you will.”

“Thanks,” she said soberly.

For some weeks after this we saw little of the Mistertons.  Then Jim rode down to the ranch with an exciting piece of news.

“I’ve got a pup coming out.”

A “pup” in California means a young English gentleman, generally the fool of the family, who pays a premium to some fellow-countryman in return for board and lodging and the privilege of learning not so much how to do things as how not to do them—­the latter being the more common object-lesson afforded him.  Ajax and I had gleaned experience with pups, and we had long ago determined that no premium was adequate compensation for the task and responsibility of breaking them in.  Jim went into details.