her and higher forms of life to come and
locate in the desert--were placed here, in other words, to prove that
life is possible in all this desolation."

He glanced at her. "Certainly it has worked out that way, at any rate,"
he ventured. "Good old Genesis!" He smiled.

"It seems to have," she agreed, thoughtfully. "Because you and I are
here. But it goes a long way back--to Genesis--yes. Following the
initial placing, other and higher organisms, finding in their migratory
travels this evidence of life, accepted the encouragement to remain, and
did remain, feeding upon the life found here in the shape of toads and
lizards--to carry the theory forward a step--even as the toads and
lizards--to carry it back again--fed upon the insects which they in
their turn found here. Then along came other forms of life, higher in
the cosmic setting, and these, finding encouragement in the presence of
the earlier arrivals, fed upon them and remained. And so on up, to the
forerunners of our present-day animals--coyotes and prairie-dogs. And
after these, primitive man--to find encouragement in the coyotes and
prairie-dogs--and to feed upon them and remain. Then after primitive
man, the second type--the brown man; and after the brown man, the red
man; and after the red man, the white man--all with an eye to
sustenance, and finding it, and remaining."

Stephen's eyes swept around the desert absently. He knew--this young
man--that he was in the presence of a personality. For he could not help
but draw comparisons between the young woman beside him and the young
women of his acquaintance in the East. While he had found Eastern girls
vivacious, and attractive with a kind of surface charm, never had he
known one to take so quiet and unassuming an outlook upon so broad a
theme. It was the desert, he told himself. Here beside him was a type
unknown to him, and one so different from any he had as yet met with, he
felt himself ill at ease in her presence--a thing new to him, too--and
which in itself gave him cause to marvel. Yes, it was the desert. It
_must_ be the desert! In this slender girl beside him he saw a
person of insight and originality, a girl assuredly not more than twenty
years of age, attractive, and thoroughly feminine. How ever did they do
it?

He harked back in his thoughts to her theory. And he dwelt not so much
upon the theory itself as upon her manner of advancing it. Running back
over these things, recalling the music of h