“A Navajo,” said Mrs. Adams.  “They come in quite often.”

“Really?  And—­oh, I forgot—­the young man who rescued us told us that he was your son.”

“Lorry!  Rescued you?”

“Yes.”  And the girl told Mrs. Adams about the accident and the tramp.

“I’m thankful that he didn’t get killed,” was Mrs. Adams’s comment when the girl had finished.

Alone in her room, Alice Weston bared her round young arms and enjoyed a real, old-fashioned wash in a real, old-fashioned washbowl.  Who could be unhappy in this glorious country?  But mother seemed so unimpressed!  “And I hope that steering-knuckle doesn’t come for a month,” the girl told a framed lithograph of “Custer’s Last Fight,” which, contrary to all precedent, was free from fly specks.

She recalled the scene at the Notch:  the sickening sway of the car; the heavy, brutal features of the bandit, who seemed to have risen from the ground; the unexpected appearance of the young cowboy, the flash of his rope, and a struggling form whirling through the brush.

And she had said “please” when she had asked the young cowboy to let the man go.  He had refused.  She thought Western men more gallant.  But what difference did that make?  She would never see him again.  The young cowboy had seemed rather nice, until just toward the last.  As for the other man—­she shivered as she wondered what would have happened if the cowboy had not arrived when he did.

It occurred to her that she had never been refused a request in her life until that afternoon.  And the fact piqued her.  The fate of the tramp was a secondary consideration now.  She and her mother were safe.  The car would have to be repaired; but that was unimportant.  The fact that they were stranded in a real desert town, with Indians and cowboys in the streets, and vistas such as she had dreamed of shimmering in the afternoon sun, awakened an erstwhile slumbering desire for a draught of the real Romance of the West, heretofore only enjoyed in unsatisfying sips as she read of the West and its wonder trails.

A noise in the street attracted her attention.  She stepped to the window.  Just across the street a tall, heavy man was unlocking a door in a little adobe building.  Near him stood the young cowboy whom she had not expected to see again.  And there was the tramp, handcuffed and strangely white of face.  The door swung open, and the tall man stepped back.  The tramp shuffled through the low doorway, and the door was closed and locked.  The cowboy and the tall man talked for a while.  She stepped back as the men separated.

Presently she heard the cowboy’s voice downstairs.  She flushed, and gazed at herself in the glass.

“I am going to make him sorry he refused to let that man go,” she told the mirror.  “Oh, I shall be nice to him!  So nice that—­” She did not complete the thought.  She was naturally gracious.  When she set out to be exceptionally nice—­“Oo, la, la!” she exclaimed.  “And he’s nothing but a cowboy!”