and bashfully looking up for the first time.

She was a short, well-made woman, dressed in black from the hem of her
shiny skirt to the long plush bonnet-strings dangling loosely in her
lap. Her face was a firm, pleasant oval, quite unlined except near the
eyes, where there was a multitude of fine wrinkles such as come from
squinting across a desert under a desert sun. There was nothing
particularly worth noting about her face, except that it had an
exceptionally healthy appearance. But her eyes fascinated Cassidy.
They were an uncompromising, snapping black. They seemed brimming over
with vitality. They were eyes that showed a strength of will behind
them only woefully expressible in her woman's voice. They had a
compelling quality in their straightforward honesty that forced
Cassidy at once to forego the rest of her features. If he ventured to
admire the firm white chin and well-kept teeth, the eyes flashed a
stern rebuke. If his gaze slipped down to the sleazy, badly fashioned
dress, the eyes brought him up with a round turn, slapped him, and
reduced him to obedience. If his own flitted curiously to the smooth
brown hair, drawn simply, plainly away from her forehead, hers towed
him mercilessly back.

"We never drank much down tuh the ranch," she remarked, with the easy
deviance of one who understands another's failings and does not wish
to pain him by intruding their own immunity; "and now I s'pose there
won't be hardly any. I'm Sarah Gentry. Yuh know me? We live down tuh
Willow Springs."

Cassidy nodded. _He_ knew Willow Springs and its well-kept ranch. It
was the only fertile neck of land that ran down to Ochre Desert, an
oasis, a veritable paradise of cottonwoods, willows, dark fields of
alfalfa, a capably fenced corral, long lines of beehives, and
apple-and olive-trees.

Cassidy grinned feebly. "I know. I stoled a mushmelon there last
week."

"I saw yuh," said Sarah Gentry quickly, but without a shadow of
malice. "Your head is tuh red. Yuh better stick tuh grapes at night."

Cassidy collapsed.

"My husband died yesterday, from consumption," she went on, with an
even, steady flow of talk. "And I came in here tuh get a preacher tuh
bury him. I heard the railroad was comin' this way, and I figured
Christianity would come clippin' right along behind. But I guess it
won't pull in for quite a spell. It just beats me how the devil
_always_ gets the head start. _He_ kin always get in somehow, ridin'
the rods, o