ning, just at dawn, Dick and Ernest, each driving a team,
pulled up before the cook tent where Roger and Qui-tha were finishing
breakfast.

"Charley says you're to come up there for supper to-night," called Dick.
"Felicia has permission to come down to fetch you at five o'clock."

"All right," returned Roger. "When do you expect to be back, Dick?"

"All depends on luck. Perhaps not before Friday noon."

"Take care of Ernest," called Roger as the two teams started on. "He's
flighty!"

"Don't get drowned in that fine well of yours, Rog!" shouted Ernest.

Roger lighted his pipe and helped Qui-tha clean the plates and cups with
sand and old newspaper.

"Don't know how we'll do dishes when the newspapers give out, Qui-tha,"
he said.

"Keep burro. He clean 'em," suggested Qui-tha, with a mischievous grin.

"Wah! Go way! We're not Hualapais like you," retorted Roger.

Qui-tha laughed, and followed Roger to the well. The chill of the early
March morning was beginning to lift.

Roger pulled off his coat, preparatory to dropping down into the well,
then paused. The sun was just lifting over the peaks. The ranch house
was in black shadow. No man with Roger's capacity for work could be
lonely with that work at hand. No man with Roger's fine imagination
could have failed to have felt his pulses quicken at the sudden
conception of the desert's wonders that flashed before his mind as his
outward eye took in the sunrise. He saw in flashing panorama the
desert's magnificent distances, its unbelievable richness of coloring,
its burning desert noons, its still windswept nights, and a vague waking
of passions he never had known stirred within his self and work-centered
soul.

The air was full of bird song. What Ernest called the dawn's enchantment
was just ending. Blackbird and robin, oriole and mocking bird, piped
full-throated from every cactus. To Ernest this was the one redeeming
touch to the desert's austerity. To Roger it was the crowning of an
almost unbearable charm. The sun wheeled in full glory over the peaks.
The adobe flashed out from the shadow and Roger slid down into the well.

He loaded the bucket with broken rock and called to Qui-tha to hoist
away. To his surprise, there was no response. Roger climbed hurriedly
out, calling to the Indian. He looked in the cook tent and the living
tent and then his eye caught Qui-tha's tall figure already diminished by
distance, moving rapidly westward toward the River Range