Then Madeline sat upon the porch and fell to interested observation of her surrounding.  Near at hand it was decidedly not prepossessing.  The street was deep in dust, and the cool wind whipped up little puffs.  The houses along this street were all low, square, flat-roofed structures made of some kind of red cement.  It occurred to her suddenly that this building-material must be the adobe she had read about.  There was no person in sight.  The long street appeared to have no end, though the line of houses did not extend far.  Once she heard a horse trotting at some distance, and several times the ringing of a locomotive bell.  Where were the mountains, wondered Madeline.  Soon low over the house-roofs she saw a dim, dark-blue, rugged outline.  It seemed to charm her eyes and fix her gaze.  She knew the Adirondacks, she had seen the Alps from the summit of Mont Blanc, and had stood under the great black, white-tipped shadow of the Himalayas.  But they had not drawn her as these remote Rockies.  This dim horizon line boldly cutting the blue sky fascinated her.  Florence Kingsley’s expression “beckoning mountains” returned to Madeline.  She could not see or feel so much as that.  Her impression was rather that these mountains were aloof, unattainable, that if approached they would recede or vanish like the desert mirage.

Madeline went to her room, intending to rest awhile, and she fell asleep.  She was aroused by Florence’s knock and call.

“Miss Hammond, your brother has come back with Stillwell.”

“Why, how I have slept!” exclaimed Madeline.  “It’s nearly six o’clock.”

“I’m sure glad.  You were tired.  And the air here makes strangers sleepy.  Come, we want you to meet old Bill.  He calls himself the last of the cattlemen.  He has lived in Texas and here all his life.”

Madeline accompanied Florence to the porch.  Her brother, who was sitting near the door, jumped up and said: 

“Hello, Majesty!” And as he put his arm around her he turned toward a massive man whose broad, craggy face began to ripple and wrinkle.  “I want to introduce my friend Stillwell to you.  Bill, this is my sister, the sister I’ve so often told you about—­ Majesty.”

“Wal, wal, Al, this’s the proudest meetin’ of my life,” replied Stillwell, in a booming voice.  He extended a huge hand.  “Miss—­ Miss Majesty, sight of you is as welcome as the rain an’ the flowers to an old desert cattleman.”

Madeline greeted him, and it was all she could do to repress a cry at the way he crunched her hand in a grasp of iron.  He was old, white-haired, weather-beaten, with long furrows down his checks and with gray eyes almost hidden in wrinkles.  If he was smiling she fancied it a most extraordinary smile.  The next instant she realized that it had been a smile, for his face appeared to stop rippling, the light died, and suddenly it was like rudely chiseled stone.  The quality of hardness she had seen in Stewart was immeasurably intensified in this old man’s face.