Here, too, she left her shopping list and money for the stage driver, who bought what she needed and left the goods at the foot of the post, and what money remained in a buckskin bag in the macaroni box.

An obliging stage driver was he, a tobacco chewing, red-faced, red-whiskered stage driver who nagged at his four horses incessantly and never was known to beat one of them; a garrulous, soft-hearted stage driver who understood very well how lonely these two young folks must be, and who therefore had some moth-eaten joke ready for whoever might be waiting for him at the macaroni box.  Whenever Helen May apologized for the favor she must ask of him—­which was every time she handed him a list—­the stage driver invariably a nasal kind of snort, spat far out over the wheel, and declared pettishly: 

“It ain’t a mite uh trouble in the world.  That’s what I’m fur—­to help folks out along my rowt.  Don’t you worry a mite about that.”  Often as he said it, he yet gave it the tone of sincerity and of convincing freshness, as though he had never before given the matter a thought.  Helen May did not know what she would have done without that stage driver to bridge the gulf between Sunlight Basin and the world.

But this was not stage day.  That is to say, the stage had passed to the far side of its orbit, and would not return until to-morrow.  From San Bonito it swung in a day-long journey across the desert to Malpais, thence by a different route to San Bonito again, so that Helen May never saw it returning whence it had come.

A cloud of desert dust always heralded its approach from the east.  Sometimes after the first dust signal, it took him nearly an hour to top the low ridge which was really one rim of the Basin.  Then Helen May would know that he carried passengers or freight that straightened the backs of the straining four horses in the long stretch of sand beyond the ridge and made their progress slow.

But to-day there was no dust signal, and the macaroni box was but a dismal reminder of her exile.  The world was very far away, behind the violet rim of mountains, and she was just a speck in the desert.  Her high laced boots were heavy, and the dust settled in the creases around her slim ankles, that could be perfectly fascinating in silken hose and dainty slippers.  Her khaki skirt, of the divided kind much affected by tourists, had lost two big, pearl buttons, and she had no others to replace them.  Her shirt-waist had its collar turned inside for coolness, and the hollow of her neck was sun-blistered and beginning to peel.  Also her nose and her neck at the sides were showing a disposition to grow new skin for old.  So much had the desert sun done for her.

But there was something else which the desert had done, something which Helen May did not fully realize.  It had put a clear, steady look into her eyes in place of the glassy shine of fever.  It was beginning to fill out that hollow in her neck, so that it no longer showed the angular ends of her collar bones.  It had put a resilient quality into her walk, firmness into the poise of her head.  It had made it physically possible, for instance, for Helen May to trudge out into the wild to hunt nine goats that had strayed from the main band.