Then Belding led the lame horse toward the watering-trough, while the two rangers went toward the house, Dick was telling Ladd about the affair at Papago Well when they turned the corner under the porch.  Nell was sitting in the door.  She rose with a little scream and came flying toward them.

“Now I’ll get it,” whispered Ladd.  “The women’ll make a baby of me.  An’ shore I can’t help myself.”

“Oh, Laddy, you’ve been hurt!” cried Nell, as with white cheeks and dilating eyes she ran to him and caught his arm.

“Nell, I only run a thorn in my ear.”

“Oh, Laddy, don’t lie!  You’ve lied before.  I know you’re hurt.  Come in to mother.”

“Shore, Nell, it’s only a scratch.  My bronch throwed me.”

“Laddy, no horse every threw you.”  The girl’s words and accusing eyes only hurried the ranger on to further duplicity.

“Mebbe I got it when I was ridin’ hard under a mesquite, an’ a sharp snag—­”

“You’ve been shot!...Mama, here’s Laddy, and he’s been shot!....Oh, these dreadful days we’re having!  I can’t bear them!  Forlorn River used to be so safe and quiet.  Nothing happened.  But now!  Jim comes home with a bloody hole in him—­then Dick—­then Laddy!....Oh, I’m afraid some day they’ll never come home.”

The morning was bright, still, and clear as crystal.  The heat waves had not yet begun to rise from the desert.

A soft gray, white, and green tint perfectly blended lay like a mantle over mesquite and sand and cactus.  The canyons of distant mountain showed deep and full of lilac haze.

Nell sat perched high upon the topmost bar of the corral gate.  Dick leaned beside her, now with his eyes on her face, now gazing out into the alfalfa field where Belding’s thoroughbreds grazed and pranced and romped and whistled.  Nell watched the horses.  She loved them, never tired of watching them.  But her gaze was too consciously averted from the yearning eyes that tried to meet hers to be altogether natural.

A great fenced field of dark velvety green alfalfa furnished a rich background for the drove of about twenty white horses.  Even without the horses the field would have presented a striking contrast to the surrounding hot, glaring blaze of rock and sand.  Belding had bred a hundred or more horses from the original stock he had brought up from Durango.  His particular interest was in the almost unblemished whites, and these he had given especial care.  He made a good deal of money selling this strain to friends among the ranchers back in Texas.  No mercenary consideration, however, could have made him part with the great, rangy white horses he had gotten from the Durango breeder.  He called them Blanco Diablo (White Devil), Blanco Sol (White Sun), Blanca Reina (White Queen), Blanca Mujer (White Woman), and El Gran Toro Blanco (The Big White Bull).  Belding had been laughed at by ranchers for preserving the sentimental Durango names, and he had been unmercifully ridiculed by cowboys.  But the names had never been changed.