o think it over longer."

They came to where Bryant stood, unconcealed pleasure showing on Mrs.
Stevenson's face.

"You may like to see these kodak pictures of the farm and its house,"
the young man said, producing an envelope from a pocket. "Take a chair
here by the window, Mrs. Stevenson, where you'll have the light. See,
this one shows the house, with the trees and lilac bushes in front,
and gives you a glimpse of the flower garden. Pretty, don't you
think?"

She readjusted her spectacles. After a time she gazed from the
pictures through the window at the stretch of sagebrush.

"And I'll have neighbours, too," she said, in an unsteady voice. "The
loneliness here was killing me."

Stevenson considered the backs of his hands in awkward silence.

"Neighbours, lots of them," Bryant affirmed.

"I kind of pity you having to stay," she said, looking up at him with
a smile.

The engineer laughed.

"Why, this country suits me right down to the ground," he replied.
"I've been in the West ten years, wouldn't live anywhere else. And I
don't expect to be lonely; Menocal will probably attend to that.
Besides, there are two good-looking young ladies just south of here,
on Sarita Creek."

"That's so," she said, laughing also.

"First thing we hear, you'll be married," Stevenson remarked, with a
quick grin.

"Oh, I'm safe--there are two of them," Bryant returned, clapping the
rancher on the shoulder.

CHAPTER III

The town of Bartolo slumbered in the July sunshine. Nothing stirred on
its one long street, lined with scarcely a break on either side by
mud-plastered houses that made a continuous brown wall, marked at
intervals by a door or pierced by a window; nothing stirred, neither
in front of Menocal's large frame store at the upper end of it, with
the little bank adjoining, nor before the small courthouse grounds
across the way, where the huge old cottonwoods spread their shade, nor
along the entire length of the beaten street down to Gomez's
blacksmith shop and Martinez's saloon across from each other at the
lower end; nothing, not even the pair of burros drowsing in the shade
of the wall, or the dogs lying before doors, or the goats a-kneel by
the saloon, or the fowls nested down in the dust. Only the Pinas
River, issuing from the black canon a mile or so above, was in motion;
and, indeed, it appeared to partake of the general somnolence, barely
rippling along its gravelly bed, shallow and shrunken, an