“Stevens, I hope the car is in good shape,” she had said.  “Now, Miss Hammond, she’s as right as the best-trained hoss I ever rode,” he had replied.

“The valley road is perfect,” she had gone on, musingly.  “I never saw such a beautiful road, even in France.  No fences, no ditches, no rocks, no vehicles.  Just a lonely road on the desert.”

“Shore, it’s lonely,” Stevens had answered, with slowly brightening eyes.  “An’ safe, Miss Hammond.”

“My sister used to like fast riding.  If I remember correctly, all of my guests were a little afflicted with the speed mania.  It is a common disease with New-Yorkers.  I hope, Stevens, that you will not give them reason to think we are altogether steeped in the slow, dreamy manana languor of the Southwest.”

Link doubtfully eyed her, and then his bronze face changed its dark aspect and seemed to shine.

“Beggin’ your pardon, Miss Hammond, thet’s shore tall talk fer Link Stevens to savvy.  You mean—­as long as I drive careful an’ safe I can run away from my dust, so to say, an’ get here in somethin’ less than the Greaser’s to-morrow?”

Madeline had laughed her assent.  And now, as she watched the thin streak of dust, at that distance moving with snail pace, she reproached herself.  She trusted Stevens; she had never known so skilful, daring, and iron-nerved a driver as he was.  If she had been in the car herself she would have had no anxiety.  But, imagining what Stevens would do on forty miles and more of that desert road, Madeline suffered a prick of conscience.

“Oh, Stillwell!” she exclaimed.  “I am afraid I will go back on my wonderful idea.  What made me do it?”

“Your sister wanted the real thing, didn’t she?  Said they all wanted it.  Wal, I reckon they’ve begun gettin’ it,” replied Stillwell.

That statement from the cattleman allayed Madeline’s pangs of conscience.  She understood just what she felt, though she could not have put it in words.  She was hungry for a sight of well-remembered faces; she longed to hear the soft laughter and gay repartee of old friends; she was eager for gossipy first-hand news of her old world.  Nevertheless, something in her sister’s letter, in messages from the others who were coming, had touched Madeline’s pride.  In one sense the expected guests were hostile, inasmuch as they were scornful and curious about the West that had claimed her.  She imagined what they would expect in a Western ranch.  They would surely get the real thing, too, as Stillwell said; and in that certainty was satisfaction for a small grain of something within Madeline which approached resentment.  She wistfully wondered, however, if her sister or friends would come to see the West even a little as she saw it.  That, perhaps, would he hoping too much.  She resolved once for all to do her best to give them the sensation their senses craved, and equally to show them the sweetness and beauty and wholesomeness and strength of life in the Southwest.