Peter could never have dreamed just that, but all the same it is a pity
that, in order to make the dream a reality, Peter had been forced to deny
himself the joy of seeing Helen May growing strong in "Arizona, New
Mexico, or Colorado." It would have made the price he paid seem less
terrible, less tragic.

CHAPTER SEVEN

MOONLIGHT, A MAN AND A SONG

Just out from the entrance to a deep, broad-bottomed arroyo where an
automobile had been, Starr came upon something that surprised him very
much, and it was not at all easy to surprise Starr. Here, in the first
glory of a flaming sunset that turned the desert to a sea of unearthly,
opal-tinted beauty, he came upon Helen May, trudging painfully along with
an old hoe-handle for a staff, and driving nine reluctant nanny goats
that alternately trotted and stood still to stare at the girl with
foolish, amber-colored eyes.

Starr was trained to long desert distances, but his training had made it
second nature to consider a horse the logical means of covering those
distances. To find Helen May away out here, eight miles and more from
Sunlight Basin, and to find her walking, shocked Starr unspeakably;
shocked him out of his shyness and into free speech with her, as though
he had known her a long while.

"Y' _lost_?" was his first greeting, while he instinctively swung Rabbit
to head off a goat that suddenly "broke back" from the others.

Helen May looked up at him with relief struggling through the apathy of
utter weariness. "No, but I might as well be. I'll never be able to get
home alive, anyhow." She shook the hoe-handle menacingly at a hesitating
goat and quite suddenly collapsed upon the nearest rock, and began to
cry; not sentimentally or weakly or in any other feminine manner known to
Starr, but with an angry recklessness that was like opening a safety
valve. Helen May herself did not understand why she should go along for
half a day calmly enough, and then, the minute this man rode up and spoke
to her sympathetically, she should want to sit down and cry.

"I just--I've been walking since one o'clock! If I had a gun, I'd shoot
every one of them. I just--I think goats are simply _damnable_ things!"

Starr turned and looked at the animals disapprovingly. "They sure are,"
he assented comfortingly. "Where you trying to take 'em--or ain't you?"
he asked, with the confidence-inviting tone that made him so valuable to
those who paid for his services.

"Home, if you