XXXV

THE DESERT

It was only recently that Clint Wadley had become a man of wealth, and
life in the Panhandle was even yet very primitive according to
present-day standards. There was no railroad within one hundred and
fifty miles of the A T O ranch. Once in two weeks one of the cowboys
rode to Clarendon to get the mail and to buy small supplies. Otherwise
contact with the world was limited to occasional visits to town.

As a little girl Ramona had lived in a one-room house built of round
logs, with a stick-and-mud chimney, a door of clapboards daubed with mud
at the chinks, and a dirt floor covered with puncheons. She had slept in
a one-legged bedstead fitted into the wall, through the sides and ends
of which bed, at intervals of eight inches, holes had been bored to
admit of green rawhide strips for slats. She had sat on a home-made
three-legged stool at a home-made table in homespun clothes and eaten a
dish of cush[8] for her supper. She had watched her aunt make soap out
of lye dripping from an ash-hopper. The only cooking utensils in the
house had been a Dutch oven, a three-legged skillet, a dinner-pot, a
tea-kettle, a big iron shovel, and a pair of pot-hooks suspended from an
iron that hung above the open fire.

But those were memories of her childhood in southern Texas. With the
coming of prosperity Clint had sent his children to Tennessee to school,
and Ramona had been patiently trained to the feebleness of purpose
civilization in those days demanded of women of her class and section.
She had been taught to do fancy needlework and to play the piano as a
parlor accomplishment. It had been made plain to her that her business
in life was to marry and keep the home fires burning, and her schooling
had been designed, not to prepare her as a mate for her future husband,
but to fit her with the little graces that might entice him into
choosing her for a wife.

Upon her return to the ranch Ramona had compromised between her training
and her inheritance. She took again to horseback riding and to shooting,
even though she read a good deal and paid due attention to her
pink-and-white complexion.

So that when she looked up from the cavern in which she was buried and
caught a gleam of a star in the slit of blue sky above, she was not so
helpless as her schooling had been designed to make her. The girl was
compact of supple strength. Endurance and a certain toughness of fiber
had come to her from old Clint Wadley.