llage, the great broken wall of the mountains
rising before them, deceptively near, and yet austerely remote, dazzling
snow domes and spires crowning the rock-buttressed slopes and appearing
sometimes to float, as unsubstantial clouds, in an atmosphere of all
commingling and contrasting blues and purples. Presently they turned
into a lane of mesquite trees. The growth of these trees was thick on
either side and the branches arched above their heads. They had stepped
in a footfall's space into a new world. It was one of those surprising,
almost unbelievable contrasts in which the desert abounds.

A moment before they had gazed upon the mountains, spectacularly vivid
in the clear atmosphere, white peaks and azure skies, green foothills,
serrated with black shadows. Behind them the sun-flooded white glare of
the great, waste place and behold! all these vanished as they set their
feet in this garden inclosed, this bower as green and quiet as the lane
of a distant and far softer and more fertile country.

Pearl never made any conventional attempts at conversation, and for a
time they walked in silence through those fairy aisles where the light
fell golden-green and the sun only filtered in tiny broken disks through
the delicate lace of the mesquite leaves. Then Flick spoke:

"Pearl, I got something to say to you, and it's about the hardest thing
I ever tried to do, because I know," his mouth twisted a little, "that
you're not going to like me any better for it."

"What do you do it for then, Bob?" she asked, and there was more than a
half impatient mockery in her tone, there was wonder.

"I got to," he said doggedly. "I guess there's no sense in it, but,
whether you like it or not, I always got to do what seems the best thing
for you."

It was an inflexible attitude, an ideal of conduct unfalteringly held,
and uncompromisingly adhered to, and she knew it. Therefore, she
shrugged her shoulders resignedly, the faint horse-shoe frown again
appearing in her forehead. "Well--go on, then," her voice as resigned as
her shoulders, "and get it over."

"It's this--" he hesitated and looked down at her a moment, and the
tenderness his glance expressed she did not lift her eyes to see and
would not have noticed if she had; "Pearl, Hanson ain't on the level."

She laughed that slightly grating, almost unpleasant, laugh of hers.
"It's no secret to me, Bob, that several of you are thinking that."

"We got cause to," he answered mo