Each day the air grew warmer.  Tiny green shoots appeared in the rusty tangle of last season’s mesa grasses.  Imperceptibly the dull-hued mesas became fresh carpeted with green across which the wind bore a subtly soft fragrance of sun-warmed spruce and pine.

To Lorry the coming of the Bronsons was like the return of old friends.  Although he had known them but a short summer season, isolation had brought them all close together.  Their reunion was celebrated with an old-fashioned dinner of roast beef and potatoes, hot biscuit and honey, an apple pie that would have made a New England farmer dream of his ancestors, and the inevitable coffee of the high country.

And Dorothy had so much to tell him of the wonderful winter desert; the old Mexican who looked after their horses, and his wife who cooked for them.  Of sunshine and sandstorms, the ruins of ancient pueblos in which they discovered fragments of pottery, arrowheads, beads, and trinkets, of the lean, bronzed cowboys of the South, of the cattle and sheep, until in her enthusiasm she forgot that Lorry had always known of these things.  And Lorry, gravely attentive, listened without interrupting her until she asked why he was so silent.

“Because I’m right happy, miss, to see you lookin’ so spry and pretty.  I’m thinkin’ Arizona has been kind of a heaven for you.”

“And you?” she queried, laughing.

“Well, it wasn’t the heat that would make me call it what it was up here last winter.  I rode up once while you was gone.  Gray Leg could just make it to the cabin.  It wasn’t so bad in the timber.  But comin’ across the mesa the cinchas sure scraped snow.”

“Right here on our mesa?”

“Right here, miss.  From the edge of the timber over there to this side it was four feet deep on the level.”

“And now,” she said, gesturing toward the wavering grasses.  “But why did you risk it?”

Lorry laughed.  He had not considered it a risk.  “You remember that book you lent me.  Well, I left it in my cabin.  There was one piece that kep’ botherin’ me.  I couldn’t recollect the last part about those ’Little Fires.’  I was plumb worried tryin’ to remember them verses.  When I got it, I sure learned that piece from the jump to the finish.”

“The ‘Little Fires’?  I’m glad you like it.  I do.

  “’From East to West they’re burning in tower and forge
       and home,
  And on beyond the outlands, across the ocean foam;
  On mountain crest and mesa, on land and sea and height,
  The little fires along the trail that twinkle down the night.’

“And about the sheep-herder; do you remember how—­

  “’The Andalusian herder rolls a smoke and points the way,
  As he murmurs, “Caliente,” “San Clemente,” “Santa Fe,”
  Till the very names are music, waking memoried desires,
  And we turn and foot it down the trail to find the little fires. 
  Adventuring!  Adventuring!  And, oh, the sights to see! 
  And little fires along the trail that wink at you and me.’”