“Oh, that makes it better.  I wasn’t feeling comfortable riding, but men are so queer about thinking they must give a woman all the choice bits of comfort, and a woman has to give in or row about it.  If you’ll climb up and ride when you feel like it, I’ll just settle down and enjoy myself.”

Settling down and enjoying herself seemed to consist of gazing out over the desert and the hills and up at the sky that was showing the deep purple of dusk.  It was what Starr wanted most of all, just then, for it left him free to study what she had told him of the big black automobile with four coated and goggled men who had looked like Mexicans; four men who had glared at her and then had speeded up to get away from her possible scrutiny.

For the first time since she had seen it from the spring seat of a jolting wagon from the one livery stable in Malpais, Helen May discovered that this wild, strange land was beautiful.  For the first time she gloried in its bigness and its wildness, and did not resent its barrenness.  The little brown birds that fluttered close to the ground and cheeped wistfully to one another in the dusk gave her an odd, sweet thrill of companionship.  Jack rabbits sitting up on their hind legs for a brief scrutiny before they scurried away made her laugh to herself.  The reddened clouds that rimmed the purple were the radiant shores of a wonderful, bottomless sea, where the stars were the mast lights on ships hull down in the distance.  She lifted her chest and drew in long breaths of clean, sweet air that is like no other air, and she remembered all at once that she had not coughed since daylight.  She breathed again, deep and long, and felt that she was drawing some wonderful, healing ether into her lungs.

She looked at Starr, walking steadily along before her, swinging the hoe-handle lightly in his right hand, setting his feet down in the smoothest spots always and leaving nearly always a clear imprint of his foot in the sandy soil.  There was a certain fascination in watching the lines of footprints he left behind him.  She would know those footprints anywhere, she told herself.  Small for a man, they were, and well-shaped, with the toes pointing out the least little bit, and with no blurring drag when he lifted his feet.  She did not know that Starr wore riding boots made to his measure and costing close to twenty dollars a pair; if she had she would not have wondered at the fine shape of them, or at the individuality of the imprint they made.  She conceived the belief that Rabbit knew those footprints also.  She amused herself by watching how carefully the horse followed wherever they led.  If Starr stepped to the right to avoid a rock, Rabbit stepped to the right to avoid that rock; never to the left, though the way might be as smooth and open.  If Starr crossed a gully at a certain place, Rabbit followed scrupulously the tracks he made.  Helen May considered that this little gray horse showed really human intelligence.