“Al told me—­and I sure saw myself—­that you weren’t used to being without your maid.  Will you let me help you?”

“Thank you, I am going to be my own maid for a while.  I expect I do appear a very helpless individual, but really I do not feel so.  Perhaps I have had just a little too much waiting on.”

“All right.  Breakfast will be ready soon, and after that we’ll look about the place.”

Madeline was charmed with the old Spanish house, and the more she saw of it the more she thought what a delightful home it could be made.  All the doors opened into a courtyard, or patio, as Florence called it.  The house was low, in the shape of a rectangle, and so immense in size that Madeline wondered if it had been a Spanish barracks.  Many of the rooms were dark, without windows, and they were empty.  Others were full of ranchers’ implements and sacks of grain and bales of hay.  Florence called these last alfalfa.  The house itself appeared strong and well preserved, and it was very picturesque.  But in the living-rooms were only the barest necessities, and these were worn out and comfortless.

However, when Madeline went outdoors she forgot the cheerless, bare interior.  Florence led the way out on a porch and waved a hand at a vast, colored void.  “That’s what Bill likes,” she said.

At first Madeline could not tell what was sky and what was land.  The immensity of the scene stunned her faculties of conception.  She sat down in one of the old rocking-chairs and looked and looked, and knew that she was not grasping the reality of what stretched wondrously before her.

“We’re up at the edge of the foothills,” Florence said.  “You remember we rode around the northern end of the mountain range?  Well, that’s behind us now, and you look down across the line into Arizona and Mexico.  That long slope of gray is the head of the San Bernardino Valley.  Straight across you see the black Chiricahua Mountains, and away down to the south the Guadalupe Mountains.  That awful red gulf between is the desert, and far, far beyond the dim, blue peaks are the Sierra Madres in Mexico.”

Madeline listened and gazed with straining eyes, and wondered if this was only a stupendous mirage, and why it seemed so different from all else that she had seen, and so endless, so baffling, so grand.

“It’ll sure take you a little while to get used to being up high and seeing so much,” explained Florence.  “That’s the secret—­ we’re up high, the air is clear, and there’s the whole bare world beneath us.  Don’t it somehow rest you?  Well, it will.  Now see those specks in the valley.  They are stations, little towns.  The railroad goes down that way.  The largest speck is Chiricahua.  It’s over forty miles by trail.  Here round to the north you can see Don Carlos’s rancho.  He’s fifteen miles off, and I sure wish he were a thousand.  That little green square about half-way between here and Don Carlos—­that’s