Though she did not know it, a certain dream of Peter’s had very nearly come true.  For here were the vast plains, unpeopled, pure, immutable in their magnificent calm.  At night the stars seemed to come down and hang just over Helen May’s head.  There was the little cottage of which Peter had dreamed—­only Helen May called it a miserable little shack—­hunched against a hill; sometimes a light winked through the window at the stars; sometimes Helen May was startled at the nearness and the shrill insistence of the coyotes.  Here as Peter had dreamed so longingly and so hopelessly, were distance and quiet and calm.  And here was Helen May coming through the sunlight—­Peter never dreamed how hot it would be!—­with her deep-gold hair tousled in the wind and with the little red spots gone from her cheeks and with health in her eyes that were the color of ripe chestnuts.  When her skin had adjusted itself to the rigors of the climate, she would no doubt have freckles on her nose, just as Peter had dreamed she might have.  And if she were walking, instead of riding the gentle-eyed pony which Peter had pictured, that was not Peter’s fault, nor the fault of the dream.  There was no laugh on her lips, however.  Dreams are always pulling a veil of idealism over the face of reality, and so Helen May’s face was not happy, as Peter had dreamed it might be, but petulant and grimly determined; her ripe-red lips were moving in anathemas directed at nine detested goats.

Peter could never have dreamed just that, but all the same it is a pity that, in order to make the dream a reality, Peter had been forced to deny himself the joy of seeing Helen May growing strong in “Arizona, New Mexico, or Colorado.”  It would have made the price he paid seem less terrible, less tragic.

CHAPTER SEVEN

MOONLIGHT, A MAN AND A SONG

Just out from the entrance to a deep, broad-bottomed arroyo where an automobile had been, Starr came upon something that surprised him very much, and it was not at all easy to surprise Starr.  Here, in the first glory of a flaming sunset that turned the desert to a sea of unearthly, opal-tinted beauty, he came upon Helen May, trudging painfully along with an old hoe-handle for a staff, and driving nine reluctant nanny goats that alternately trotted and stood still to stare at the girl with foolish, amber-colored eyes.

Starr was trained to long desert distances, but his training had made it second nature to consider a horse the logical means of covering those distances.  To find Helen May away out here, eight miles and more from Sunlight Basin, and to find her walking, shocked Starr unspeakably; shocked him out of his shyness and into free speech with her, as though he had known her a long while.

“Y’ lost?” was his first greeting, while he instinctively swung Rabbit to head off a goat that suddenly “broke back” from the others.