Madeline established an extensive vegetable farm, and she planted orchards.  The climate was superior to that of California, and, with abundant water, trees and plants and gardens flourished and bloomed in a way wonderful to behold.  It was with ever-increasing pleasure that Madeline walked through acres of ground once bare, now green and bright and fragrant.  There were poultry-yards and pig-pens and marshy quarters for ducks and geese.  Here in the farming section of the ranch Madeline found employment for the little colony of Mexicans.  Their lives had been as hard and barren as the dry valley where they had lived.  But as the valley had been transformed by the soft, rich touch of water, so their lives had been transformed by help and sympathy and work.  The children were wretched no more, and many that had been blind could now see, and Madeline had become to them a new and blessed virgin.

Madeline looked abroad over these lands and likened the change in them and those who lived by them to the change in her heart.  It may have been fancy, but the sun seemed to be brighter, the sky bluer, the wind sweeter.  Certain it was that the deep green of grass and garden was not fancy, nor the white and pink of blossom, nor the blaze and perfume of flower, nor the sheen of lake and the fluttering of new-born leaves.  Where there had been monotonous gray there was now vivid and changing color.  Formerly there had been silence both day and night; now during the sunny hours there was music.  The whistle of prancing stallions pealed in from the grassy ridges.  Innumerable birds had come and, like the northward-journeying ducks, they had tarried to stay.  The song of meadow-lark and blackbird and robin, familiar to Madeline from childhood, mingled with the new and strange heart-throbbing song of mocking-bird and the piercing blast of the desert eagle and the melancholy moan of turtle-dove.

* * *

One April morning Madeline sat in her office wrestling with a problem.  She had problems to solve every day.  The majority of these were concerned with the management of twenty-seven incomprehensible cowboys.  This particular problem involved Ambrose Mills, who had eloped with her French maid, Christine.

Stillwell faced Madeline with a smile almost as huge as his bulk.

“Wal, Miss Majesty, we ketched them; but not before Padre Marcos had married them.  All thet speedin’ in the autoomoobile was jest a-scarin’ of me to death fer nothin’.  I tell you Link Stevens is crazy about runnin’ thet car.  Link never hed no sense even with a hoss.  He ain’t afraid of the devil hisself.  If my hair hedn’t been white it ’d be white now.  No more rides in thet thing fer me!  Wal, we ketched Ambrose an’ the girl too late.  But we fetched them back, an’ they’re out there now, spoonin’, sure oblivious to their shameless conduct.”

“Stillwell, what shall I say to Ambrose?  How shall I punish him?  He has done wrong to deceive me.  I never was so surprised in my life.  Christine did not seem to care any more for Ambrose than for any of the other cowboys.  What does my authority amount to?  I must do something.  Stillwell, you must help me.”