“Firio, we’re ready to hear Jag Ear’s bells!” he called.

“Si!” answered Firio.

All the while the Indian had kept in the shadow, away from the spray of light from the store lamp, unaware of the rapid drama that had passed among the boxes and barrels.  He had observed nothing unusual in the young lady, whose outward manifestation of what she had, witnessed was the closing of her eyes.

It was out of the question that Jack should mount a horse when both arms were crowded with their burden.  He walked beside Mary’s stirrup leather in the attitude of that attendant on royalty who bears a crown on a cushion.

“Little Rivers is a new town, isn’t it?” he asked.

“Yes, the Town Wonderful,” she answered.  “Father founded it.”

She spoke with an affection which ran as deep into the soil as young roots after water.  If on the pass she had seemed a part of the desert, of great, lonely distances and a far-flung carpet of dreams, here she seemed to belong to books and gardens.

“I wish I had time to look over the Town Wonderful in the morning, but my train goes very early, I believe.”

After his years of aimless travelling, to which he had so readily confessed, he had tied himself to a definite hour on a railroad schedule as something commanding and inviolable.  Such inconsistency did not surprise her.  Had she not already learned to expect inconsistencies from him?

“Oh, it is all simple and primitive, but it means a lot to us,” she said.

“What one’s home and people mean to him is pretty well all of one’s own human drama,” he returned, seriously.

The peace of evening was in the air and the lights along the single street were a gentle and persistent protest of human life against the mighty stretch of the enveloping mantle of night.  From the cottages of the ranchers came the sound of voices.  The twang of a guitar quivering starward made medley with Jag Ear’s bells.

Here, for a little distance, the trail, in its long reach on the desert, had taken on the dignity of the urban name of street.  On either side, fronting the cottages, ran the slow waters of two irrigation ditches, gleaming where lamp-rays penetrated the darkness.  The date of each rancher’s settlement was fairly indicated by the size of the quick-growing umbrella and pepper-trees which had been planted for shade.  Thus all the mass of foliage rose like a mound of gentle slope toward the centre of the town, where Jack saw vaguely the outlines of a rambling bungalow, more spacious if no more pretentious than its neighbors in its architecture.  At a cement bridge over the ditch, leading to a broad veranda under the soft illumination of a big, wrought-iron lantern, Mary drew rein.

“This is home,” she said; “and—­and thank you!”

He could not see her face, which was in the shadow turned toward him, as he looked into the light of the lantern from the other side of her pony.