“Our what?” asked Cartwell, entering the room at the last word.  He was looking very cool and well groomed in white flannels.

Billy Porter stared at the newcomer and dropped his soup-spoon with a splash.  “What in thunder!” Rhoda heard him mutter.

Jack Newman spoke hastily.

“This is Mr. Cartwell, our irrigation engineer, Mr. Porter.”

Porter responded to the young Indian’s courteous bow with a surly nod, and proceeded with his soup.

“I’d as soon eat with a nigger as an Injun,” he said to Rhoda under cover of some laughing remark of Katherine’s to Cartwell.

“He seems to be nice,” said Rhoda vaguely.  “Maybe, though, Katherine is a little liberal, making him one of the family.”

“Is there any hunting at all in this open desert country?” asked DeWitt.  “I certainly hate to go back to New York with nothing but sunburn to show for my trip!”

“Coyotes, wildcats, rabbits and partridges,” volunteered Cartwell.  “I know where there is a nest of wildcats up on the first mesa.  And I know an Indian who will tan the pelts for you, like velvet.  A jack-rabbit pelt well tanned is an exquisite thing too, by the way.  I will go on a hunt with you whenever the ditch can be left.”

“And while they are chasing round after jacks, Miss Tuttle,” cut in Billy Porter neatly, “I will take you anywhere you want to go.  I’ll show you things these kids never dreamed of!  I knew this country in the days of Apache raids and the pony express.”

“That will be fine!” replied Rhoda.  “But I’d rather hear the stories than take any trips.  Did you spend your boyhood in New Mexico?  Did you see real Indian fights?  Did you—?” She paused with an involuntary glance at Cartwell.

Porter, too, looked at the dark young face across the table and something in its inscrutable calm seemed to madden him.

“My boyhood here?  Yes, and a happy boyhood it was!  I came home from the range one day and found my little fifteen-year-old sister and a little neighbor friend of hers hung up by the back of their necks on butcher hooks.  They had been tortured to death by Apaches.  I don’t like Indians!”

There was an awkward pause at the dinner table.  Li Chung removed the soup-plates noiselessly.  Cartwell’s brown fingers tapped the tablecloth.  But he was not looking at Porter’s scowling face.  He was watching Rhoda’s gray eyes which were fastened on him with a look half of pity, half of aversion.  When he spoke it was as if he cared little for the opinions of the others but would set himself right with her alone.

“My father,” he said, “came home from the hunt, one day, to find his mother and three sisters lying in their own blood.  The whites had gotten them.  They all had been scalped and were dead except the baby, three years old.  She—­she—­my father killed her.”

A gasp of horror went round the table.