And yet, strangely enough, Dave realized that his emotions were unaccountably mixed.  This woman’s distress had, of course, brought a prompt and natural response; but now her implicit confidence in his honor and her utter dependence upon him awoke his deepest chivalry.  Then, too, the knowledge that her life was unhappy, indeed tragic, filled him with a sort of wondering pity.  As he continued to look at her these feelings grew until finally he turned away his face.  With his chin in his hands he stared out somberly into the blinding heat.  He had met few women, of late years, and never one quite like this—­never one, for instance, who made him feel so dissatisfied with his own shortcomings.

After a time he rose and withdrew to the shelter of another tree, there to content himself with mental images of his guest.

But one cannot sleep well with a tropic sun in the heavens, and since there was really nothing for her to do until the heat abated, Alaire, when she awoke, obliged the Ranger to amuse her.

Although she was in fact younger than he, married life had matured her, and she treated him therefore like a boy.  Law did not object.  Mrs. Austin’s position in life was such that most men were humble in her presence, and now her superior wisdom seemed to excite the Ranger’s liveliest admiration.  Only now and then, as if in an unguarded moment, did he appear to forget himself and speak with an authority equaling her own.  What he said at such times indicated either a remarkably retentive memory or else an ability to think along original lines too rare among men of his kind to be easily credited.

For instance, during a discussion of the Mexican situation—­and of course their talk drifted thither, for at the moment it was the one vitally interesting topic along the border—­he excused the barbarous practices of the Mexican soldiers by saying: 

“Of course they’re cruel, vindictive, treacherous, but after all there are only a hundred and forty generations between us and Adam; only a hundred and forty lifetimes since the Garden of Eden.  We civilized peoples are only a lap or two ahead of the uncivilized ones.  When you think that it takes ten thousand generations to develop a plant and root out some of its early heredities, you can see that human beings have a long way yet to go before they become perfect.  We’re creatures of environment, just like plants.  Environment has made the Mexican what he is.”

Certainly this was an amazing speech to issue from a sun-browned cowboy sitting cross-legged under a mesquite-tree.

From under her hat-brim Alaire Austin eyed the speaker with a curiosity into which there had come a vague hostility.  For the moment she was suspicious and piqued, but Law did not appear to notice, and as he talked on her doubts gradually subsided.

“You said, last night, that you were born on the other side?” She inclined her ruddy head to the west.