there—­every man suspicious, every man scared, every man afraid of his own shadow—­not a clean, true note in all the world; and incidentally a woman behind every tree, in every corner, whichever way you turned.  Life in the States was being a peon with a halter around your neck.  But it was never that way here.  There never was any crime in Heart’s Desire.  It’s no crime to shoot a man when he’s tired of living and wants you to kill him.  Why, this was Heart’s Desire until—­”

“Until the press got loose?”

“It’s loose all over the world!” cried Dan Anderson.  “They’ve got out.  You can’t keep them in.  How did Charlie Allen get killed over at Sumner?  Woman in it.  When the boys arrested this fellow Garcia over at the Nogales, what was it all about?  A woman.  What set the desperado Arragon on the warpath so the boys had to kill him?  That was a woman, too.  What made Bill Hilliard kill Pete Anderson?  Woman moved in within fifty miles of them on the Nogales.  Here’s Curly; good man in his profession.  Night-wrangler, day-herder, bog-rider, buster, top-waddy—­why, he’d be the old man on the range for his company if that Kansas family hadn’t moved down in here and married him.  It’s Paradise Lost, that’s what it is.  Arizona next, and it’s full of copper mines and railroads.  Where shall we go?” The sweat stood full on his lip now, and a deep line ran across his forehead.  “Where shall we go?” he repeated insistently.  “Come!”

In my own bitterness at all this I grew sarcastic with him.  “Sit down,” said I.  “Why all this foolishness about a college girl with a shirtwaist and a straw hat?”

“Oh, now,” and his forehead puckered up, “don’t you be deceived for one minute, my friend.  This wasn’t ordinary.  No plain woman; no common or crimping variety.  Just a specimen of the great ’North American Girl!” He took off his hat.  “And may God bless her, goin’ or comin’!” said he.

This was the most untoward situation ever yet known in the valley of Heart’s Desire.  Dan Andersen was proving recreant to our creed.  And yet, what could be done?

Dan Anderson presently made the situation more specific.  “May old Jack Wilson just be damned!” said he.  “If he hadn’t found that gold prospect up on the Homestake, we might have lived here forever.  Besides, there’s the coal fields yonder on the Patos, no one knows how big.”

Coal!  That meant Eastern Capital.  I could have guessed the rest before he told it.

“Oh, of course, we’ve got to sell our coal mines, and get a lot of States men in here monkeyin’ around.  And, of course, it couldn’t have been anybody else but the particular daddy of this particular girl who had to come pokin’ in here to look at the country!  He’s got money literally sinful.”

“But, man,” I cried, “you don’t mean to say that the girl’s coming, too?”

He nodded mutely.  “They’re out,” said he, at last.  “You can’t get away from ’em.  They’re all over the world.”