nder the edge of the bed,
feeling for his shoes.

"A love--lee time to go to work," he growled, good-naturedly. "Here is
where the early bird catches the tractor--and the devil."

When he came out of the door a few minutes later, buttoning his
corduroy coat--even in Imperial Valley, which knows no winter, one
needs a coat on a March night--Rogeen stood for a moment on the step
and put up his long arms again to stretch some of the deep sleep from
his muscles. He was not at all enthusiastic about odd jobs at
midnight; but in a moment his eyes fell on the slanting moonlight that
shone mistily on the chinaberry tree in the _patio_; the town on the
American side was fast asleep; the wind with the smell of sagebrush
stirred a clump of bamboo. The desert night had him--and when he rode
away toward the Mexican line he had forgotten his gun and taken his
fiddle.

He passed through Mexicali, the Mexican town, where the saloons were
still open and the lights over the Red Owl, the great gambling hall,
winked with glittering sleeplessness; and out upon the road by the
irrigation canal, fringed with cottonwood and willows.

He let the reins drop over the saddlehorn, and brought the fiddle round
in front of him. There was no hurry, he would be there before
daylight. And he laughed as he ran his right thumb over the strings:

"What a combination--a fool, a fiddle, and a tractor."

Bob could not explain what impulse had made him bring a fiddle with him
on the way to mend a balky gasoline engine. As a youth--they had
called him rather a wild youth--he had often ridden through the Ozark
hills at night time with his fiddle under his arm. But in the last
eight years he had played the thing only once, and that once had come
so near finishing him that he still carried the receipt of the
undertaker who came to bury him the next day.

"Oh, well," Bob grinned into the night as he threw his right knee over
the saddlehorn and put the fiddle to his shoulder, "we'll see how she
goes once more."

For three miles he rode leisurely on, a striking figure in the dim
moonlight--a tall young man on a gray horse, fiddling wildly to the
desert night.

He crossed the bridge over the main canal, left the fringe of
cottonwood and willow, and turned across the open toward the Red Butte
Ranch. The fiddle was under his arm. Then he saw a shack in the open
field to the right of the road. It was one of those temporary
structures of willow poles