“Durn it, why is it you never take me serious?” he complained.  “I can name over all the mean things you are, and you just waggle one ear, much as to say, ‘Aw, hell!  Same ole tune, and nothing to it but noise.’  Some of these days you’re going to get your pedigree read to you—­and read right!” He leaned forward and lovingly lifted Rabbit’s mane, holding it for a minute or two away from the sweaty neck.  “Sure’s hot out here to-day, ain’t it, pardner?” he murmured, and let the mane fall again into place.  “Kinda fries out the grease, don’t it?  If young Calvert’s got any hoss-feed in camp, I’m going to beg some off him.  Get along, the faster you go, the quicker you’ll get there.”

The desert gave place to scattered, brown cobblestones of granite.  Rabbit picked his way carefully among these, setting his feet down daintily in the interstices of the rocks.  He climbed a long slope that proved itself to be a considerable hill when one looked back at the desert below.  The farther side was more abrupt, and he took it in patient zigzags where the footing promised some measure of security.  At the bottom he turned short off to the right and made his way briskly along a rough wagon trail that hugged the hillside.

“Fresh tracks going in—­and then out again,” Starr announced musingly to Rabbit.  “Maybe young Calvert hired a load of grub brought out; that, or he’s had a visitor in the last day or two—­maybe a week back, though; this dry ground holds tracks a long while.  Go on, it’s only a mile or so now.”

The trail took a sudden turn toward the bottom of the wide depression as though it wearied of dodging rocks and preferred the loose sand below.  Of his own accord Rabbit broke into a steady lope, flinging his head sidewise now and then to discourage the pestiferous gnats that swarmed about his ears.  Starr, also driven to action of some kind, began to fling his hands in long sweeping gestures past his face.  He hoped that the cabin, being on a higher bit of ground, would be free from the pests.

Bounding a sharp turn, Starr glimpsed the cabin and frowned as something unfamiliar in its appearance caught his attention.  For just a minute he could not name the change, and then “Curtains at the windows!” he snorted.  “Now, has the dub gone and got married, wonder?” He hoped not, and his hope was born not so much from sympathy with any woman who must live in such a place, but from a very humanly, selfish regard for his own passing comfort.  With a woman in the cabin, Starr would not feel so free to break his journey there with a rest and a meal or two.

He went on, however, sitting passively in the saddle while Rabbit headed straight for the spring.  The bit of white curtain at the one small, square window facing that way troubled Starr, though it could not turn him back thirsty into the desert.

It was Rabbit who, ignorant of the significance of that flapping bit of white, was taken unawares and ducked sidewise when Helen May, standing precariously on a rock beside the spring, cupped her hands around her sun-cracked lips and shouted “Vic!” at the top of her voice.  She nearly fell off the rock when she saw the horse and rider so close.  They had come on her from behind, round another sharp nose of the rock-strewn hillside, so that she did not see them until they had discovered her.