rrific heat when the sun blazed all day, day after
day, and the thermometer climbed and climbed until it touched the 130
mark. And all these two years had been spent here at this shack, with
its dirt yard and isolation.

The desert had bit deeply into her consciousness. Even the heat, the
wind-driven sand, the stillness, the aloneness of it had entered into
her soul with a sort of fascination.

"I'm not sorry," she shut her hands hard and pressed her lips close
together, "even if we do lose--but we must not lose! We can't go on in
poverty, either here or over there. We must not lose--we must not!"

She turned her head sharply; something toward the road had moved; some
figure had appeared a moment and then disappeared. A fear that was
never wholly absent made her move toward the door of her own shack. A
revolver hung on a nail there.

And then out on the night stole the singing, quivering note of a
violin. Instantly the fear was gone, the tension past, and the tears
for the first time in all the struggle slipped down her cheeks. She
knew now that for weeks she had been hoping he would come again.

When the violin cords ceased to sing, Imogene clapped her hands warmly,
and the fiddler rose from beside a mesquite bush and came toward her.

"I'm glad you brought it this time," she said as he approached and sat
down on a box a few feet away. "That was the best music I have heard
for years."

"The best?" he questioned.

She caught the meaning in his emphasis and smiled to herself as she
answered: "The best violin music." Although her face was in the
shadow, the moonlight was on her hair and shoulders. Something in her
figure affected him as it had that night when she stood in the
doorway--some heroic endurance, some fighting courage that held it
erect, and yet it was touched by a yearning as restless and unsatisfied
as the desert wind. Bob knew her father was incapable of grappling
alone with the problems of life. This project had all been hers; it
was her will, her brain, her courage that had wrought the change on the
face of this spot of desert. Yet how softly girlish as she sat there
in the moonlight; and how alone in the heart of this sleeping desert in
an alien country. He wished she had not qualified that praise of his
playing. Bob knew very little about women.

"How do you like being a cotton planter?" She was first to break the
silence.

"Oh, very well." He turned his eyes from her for th