A shack that served as lodging-house, saloon, and dining-room, a shack for a stable, and a shack for a shed, together with a rough corral, comprised the entire group of buildings at the place.  Six or eight fine cottonwoods and a number of twisted apple trees made the little place decidedly inviting.  Behind these, rising almost sheer from the level yard, the mountains heaved upward grayly, their vast bulk broken, some hundred yards away, by a yawning rock canyon, steep and forbidding.

The station proprietor, who emerged from the door at sound of the halting machine, was a small, lank individual, as brown as an Indian and as wrinkled as a crocodile.  The driver in the car addressed him shortly.

“I wonder if you can help me put on a tire?”

The lank little host regarded him quietly, then looked at the women and drew his hand across his mouth.

“Wal, I dunno,” he answered.  “I’ve set a tire and I’ve set a hen, but I wouldn’t like to tell ye what was hatched.”

The girl in the tonneau laughed in frank delight—­a musical outburst that flattered the station host tremendously.  The man at the wheel was already alighting.

“You’ll do,” he said.  “My name is Bostwick.  I’m on my way to Goldite, in a hurry.  It won’t take us long, but it wants two men on the job.”

He had a way of thrusting his disagreeable tasks upon his fellow beings before they were prepared either to accept or refuse a proposition.  He succeeded here so promptly that the girl in the car made no effort to restrain her amusement.  She was radiantly smiling as she leaned above the wheel where the two men were presently at work.

In the midst of the toil a sound of whistling came upon the air.  The girl in the auto looked up, alertly.  It was the Toreador’s song from Carmen that she heard, riotously rendered.  A moment later the whistler appeared—­and an exclamation all but escaped the girl’s red, parted lips.

Mounted on a calico pony of strikingly irregular design, a horseman had halted at the bend of a trail that led to the rear of the station.  He saw the girl and his whistling ceased.

From his looks he might have been a bandit or a prince.  He was a roughly dressed, fearless-looking man of the hills, youthful, tall, and as carelessly graceful in the saddle as a fish in its natural clement.

The girl’s brown eyes and his blue eyes met.  She did not analyze the perfect symmetry or balance of his features; she only knew his hair and long moustache were tawny, that his face was bronzed, that his eyes were bold, frank depths of good humor and fire.  He was splendid to look at—­that she instantly conceded.  And she looked at him steadily till a warm flush rose to the pink of her ears, when her glance fell, abashed, to the pistol that hung on his saddle, and so, by way of the hoofs of his pinto steed, to the wheel, straight down where she was leaning.