He turned his head and glanced at Helen May inquiringly, then trotted over to where she sat in the shade.  His tongue still drooped quiveringly over his lower jaw; and now and then he drew it back and licked his lips as though they were dry.  Helen May found a rock that was hollowed like a crude saucer, and poured water into the hollow from her canteen.  Pat lapped it up thirstily, gave his stubby tail a wag of gratitude, lay down with his front paws on the edge of her skirt with his head dropped down upon them, and took a nap—­with one eye opening now and then to see that the goats were all right, and with his ears lifting to catch the meaning of every stray bleat from a garrulous nanny.

Helen May had changed a good deal in the past two or three weeks.  Now when she stared away and away over the desert and barren slope and ridges and mountain, she did not feel that she hated them.  Instead, she saw that the yellow of the desert, the brown of the slopes, and the black of the distant granite ledges basseting from bleak hills were more beautiful than the tidy little plots of tilled ground she used to think so lovely.  There was something hypnotic in these bald distances.  She could not read, when she was out like this; she could only look and think and dream.

She wished that she might ride out over it sometime, away over to the mountains, perhaps, as far as she could see.  She fell to dreaming of the old days when this was Spanish territory, and the king gave royal grants of land to his favorites:  for instance, all the country lying between two mountain ranges, to where a river cut across and formed a natural boundary.  Holman Sommers had told her about the old Spanish grants, and how many of the vast estates of Mexican “cattle kings” and “sheep kings” were still preserved almost intact, just as they had been when this was a part of Mexico.

She wished that she might have lived here then, when the dons held sway and when senoritas were all beautiful and when senoras were every one of them imposing in many jewels and in rich mantillas, and when vaqueros wore red sashes and beautiful serapes and big, gold-laced sombreros, and rode prancing steeds that curveted away from jingling, silver-rowelled spurs.  Helen May, you must remember, knew her moving-picture romance.  She could easily vision these things exactly as they had been presented to her on the screen.  That is why she peopled this empty land so gorgeously.

It was different now, of course.  All the Mexicans she had seen were like the Mexicans around the old Plaza in Los Angeles.  All the senoritas she had met—­they had not been many—­powdered and painted abominably to the point of their jaws and left their necks dirty.  And their petticoats were draggled and their hats looked as though they had been trimmed from the ten-cent counter of a cheap store.  All the senoras were smoky looking with snakish eyes, and the dresses under their heavy-fringed black mantillas were more frowsy than those of their daughters.  They certainly were not imposing; and if they wore jewelry at all it looked brassy and cheap.