Cool water from the bowels of the mountains fell on a figure as slender as that of the great Michael’s David pictured in the living-room; a figure whose muscles ran rippling with leanness and suppleness, without the bunching over-development of the athlete.  He bubbled in shivery delight with the first frigid sting of the downpour; he laughed in ecstasy as he pulled the valve wide open, inviting a Niagara.

While he was still glowing with the rough intimacy of the towel, he viewed the trappings thrown over the chair and his revolver holster on the bureau in a sense of detachment, as if in the surroundings of civilization some voice of civilization made him wish for flannels in which to dine.  Then there came a rap at the door, and an Indian appeared with an envelope addressed in feminine handwriting.  On the corner of the page within was a palm-tree—­a crest to which anybody who dwelt on the desert might be entitled; and Jack read: 

“DEAR MR. WINGFIELD: 

“Please don’t tell father about that horrible business on the pass.  It will worry him unnecessarily and might interfere with my afternoon rides, which are everything to me.  There is not the slightest danger in the future.  After this I shall always go armed.

“Sincerely yours,

“MARY EWOLD.”

The shower had put him in such lively humor that his answer was born in a flash from memory of her own catechising of him on Galeria.

“First, I must ask if you know how to shoot,” he scribbled beneath her signature.

The Indian seemed hardly out of the doorway before he was back with a reply: 

“I do, or I would not go armed,” it said.

She had capped his satire with satire whose prick was, somehow, delicious.  He regarded the sweep of her handwriting with a lingering interest, studying the swift nervous strokes before he sent the note back with still another postscript: 

“Of course I had never meant to tell anybody,” he wrote.  “It is not a thing to think of in that way.”

This, he thought, must be the end of the correspondence; but he was wrong.  The peripatetic go-between reappeared, and under Jack’s last communication was written, “Thank you!” He could hardly write “Welcome!” in return.  It was strictly a case of nothing more to say by either duelist.  In an impulse he slipped the sheet, with its palm symbolic of desert mystery and oasis luxuriance, into his pocket.

“Here I am in the midst of the shucks and biting into the meat of the kernel,” said Jasper Ewold, as Jack entered the library to find him standing in the midst of wrappings which he had dropped on the floor; “yes, biting into very rich meat.”

He held up the book which was evidently the one that had balanced uncertainly on the pile which Jack had brought from the post-office.

“Professor Giuccamini’s researches!  It is as interesting as a novel.  But come!  You are hungry!”