“First, you will have to plow the ground, in the broiling hot sun,” she said tauntingly, when they had passed around to the porch.  She was starting into the house with nervous, precipitate triumph.  The last word was hers, after all.

“But you are going to show me the land now!”

His tone was so serious and so hurt that she paused.

“And”—­with the seriousness electrified by a glance that sought for mutual understanding—­“and we are to forget about that duel and the whole hero-desperado business.  I am a prospective settler who just arrived this afternoon.  I came direct to headquarters to inquire about property.  The Doge not being at home, won’t you show me around?”

Again he had said the right thing at the right time, with a delightful impersonality precluding sentiment.

“I couldn’t be unaccommodating,” she admitted.  “It is against all Little Rivers ethics.”

“I feel like a butterfly about to come out of his miserable chrysalis!  Haven’t you a walking-stick?  I am going to shed the crutches!”

She became femininely solicitous at once.

“Are you sure you ought?  Did the doctor say you might?  Is the wound healed?”

“There isn’t any wound!” he answered.  “That is one of the things which we are to forget.”

She brought a stick and he laid the crutches on the porch.

He favored the lame leg, yet he kept up a clipping pace, talking the while as fast as the Doge himself as they passed through one of the side streets out onto the cactus-spotted, baking, cracked levels.

“This is it!” she said finally.  “This is all that father and I had to begin with.”

“Enough!” he answered, and held out his hands, palms open.  “With callouses I will win luxuriance!”

She showed him the irrigation ditch from which he should draw his water; she told him of the first steps; She painted all the difficulties in the darkest colors, without once lessening the glow of his optimism.  He was so overwhelmingly, boyishly happy that she had to be happy with him in making believe that he was about to be a real rancher.  But he should not have the sport all on his side.  He must not think that she accepted this latest departure of his imagination incarnated by his Thespian gift in anything but his own spirit.

“You plowing!  You spraying trees for the scale!  You digging up weeds!  You stacking alfalfa!  You settling down in one place as a unit of co-ordinate industry!  You earning bread by the sweat of your brow!  You with callouses!” Thus she laughed at him.

Very seriously he held out his hands and ran a finger around a palm and across the finger-joints: 

“That is where I shall get them,” he said.  “But not on the thumb.  I believe you get them on the thumb only by playing golf.”