Speaking of food, it seemed to take an enormous quantity to satisfy the hunger of two persons.  Helen May was appalled at the insatiable appetite of Vic, who seemed never to have enough in his stomach.  As for herself—­well, she recalled the meal she had just eaten, and wondered how it could be possible for hunger to seize upon her so soon again.  But even so, food could not occupy all of their time, and a two-room cabin does not take much keeping in order.  They would simply be throwing away money if they hired a herder, and yet, how they both did loathe those goats!

She climbed back down the pinnacle, watching nervously for snakes and lizards and horned toads and such denizens of the desert.  With a certain instinct for preparing against the worst, she took a two-quart canteen, such as soldiers carry, to the spring, and filled it and slung it over her shoulder.  She went to the cabin and made a couple of sandwiches, and because she was not altogether inhuman she cut two thick slices of bread, spread them lavishly with jam, and carried them to Vic as a peace offering.

“I’m going to hunt those nasty brutes, Vic,” she cried from a safe distance.  “Come here and get this jam sandwich, and lend me that stick you’ve got.  And if I don’t get back by five, you start a fire.”

“Where you going to look?  If you couldn’t see ’em from up there, I don’t see the use of hunting.”  Vic was taking long steps towards the sandwich, and he stretched his sunburned face in that grin which might have made him famous in comedy had fate not set him down before his present ignoble task.  “Yuh don’t want to go far,” he advised her perfunctorily.  “We ought to have a couple of saddle horses.  Why don’t yuh—­”

“What would we feed them on?  Besides we’ve got to save what money we’ve got, Vic.  We can walk till these insects grow wool enough to pay for something to ride on.”

“Hair, you mean.  I can get a gentle horse from that Mexican kid, Luis.  He good as offered us the one—­that I borrowed—­” Vic was giving too much attention to the jam sandwich to argue very coherently.

“There’s that old Billy starting off again; you watch him, Vic.  Don’t let him get a start, or goodness knows where he’ll head for next.  We can’t keep a horse, I tell you.  We need all this grass for the goats.”

“Oh, darn the goats!”

In her heart Helen May quite agreed with the sentiment, but she could not consistently betray that fact to Vic.  She therefore turned her back upon him, walking down the trail that led out of the Basin to the main trail a mile away, the trail which was the link connecting them with civilization of a sort.

Here passed the depressed, dust-covered stage three times a week.  Here, in a macaroni box mounted on a post, they received and posted their mail.  Helen May had indulged herself in a subscription to the Los Angeles daily paper that had always been left at their door every morning, the paper which Peter had read hastily over his morning mush.  Every paper brought a pang of homesickness for the flower-decked city of her birth, but she felt as though she could not have kept her sanity without it.  The full-page bargain ads she read hungrily.  The weekly announcements of the movie shows, the news, the want columns—­these were at once her solace and her torment; and if you have ever been exiled, you know what that means.