Helen, more matter-of-fact and less given to theorizing, looked about her curiously.  She found a tin cup; there was no bed, no pack, no other sign to tell who their neighbour might be.  Close by the spot where she had set down the frying-pan she noted a second spring.  Through an open space in the stunted desert growth the trail came in from the north.  Glancing northward she saw for the first time the outline of a low hill.  She stepped quickly to her father’s side and once more laid her hand on his arm.

‘What is it?’ he asked, his voice sharpening at her sudden grip.

‘It’s—­it’s spooky out here,’ she said.

He scoffed.  ’That’s a silly word.  In a natural world there is no place for the supernatural.’  He grew testy.  ’Can I ever teach you, Helen, not to employ words utterly meaningless?’

But Helen was not to be shaken.

‘Just the same, it is spooky.  I can feel it.  Look there.’  She pointed.  ’There is a hill.  There will be a little ring of hills.  In the centre of the basin they make would be the pool.  And you know what we heard about it before we left San Juan.  This whole country is strange, somehow.’

‘Strange?’ he queried challengingly.  ‘What do you mean?’

She had not relaxed her hand on his arm.  Instead, her fingers tightened as she suddenly put her face forward and whispered defiantly: 

‘I mean spooky!’

‘Helen,’ he expostulated, ‘where did you get such ideas?’

‘You heard the old Indian legends,’ she insisted, not more than half frightened but conscious of an eerie influence of the still loneliness and experiencing the first shiver of excitement as she stirred her own fancy.  ‘Who knows but there is some foundation for them?’

He snorted his disdain and scholarly contempt.

‘Then,’ said Helen, resorting to argument, ’where did that fire come from?  Who made it?  Why has he disappeared like this?’

‘Even you,’ said her father, quick as always to join issue where sound argument offered itself as a weapon, ’will hardly suppose that a spook eats bacon and drinks coffee,’

‘The—­the ghost,’ said Helen, with a humorous glance in her eyes, ‘might have whisked him away by the hair of the head!’

He shook her hand off and strode forward impatiently.  Again and again he shouted ‘Hello!’ and ‘Ho, there!  Ho, I say!’ There came no answer.  The bacon was growing cold; the fire burning down.  He turned a perplexed face towards Helen’s eager one.

‘It is odd,’ he said irritably.  He was not a man to relish being baffled.

Helen had picked up something which she had found near the spring, and was studying it intently.  He came to her side to see what it was.  The thing was a freshly-peeled willow wand, left upright where one end had been thrust down into the soft earth.  The other end had been split; into the cleft was thrust a single feather from a bluebird’s wing.