r
conversation out on the lawn, with Mexican servants to bring cigars and
punch, and with Mexican fiddlers to play the national airs under a
fig-covered band-stand.

The young people from Eagle Pass used to go over when the General
Manager's wife was giving one of her less formal affairs. They were rather
refreshing types: the Texas type, with a good deal of freedom of action
and speech, once they were drawn out, and with plenty of vigor. On these
occasions Eagle Pass merged itself into the Mexican town, and went home
late at night over the Rio Grande bridge, and regarded life as a romance.

These affairs and this variety of people interested Harboro. He was not to
be drawn out, people soon discovered; but he liked to sit on the lawn and
listen and take observations. He was not backward, but his tastes were
simple. He was seemingly quite as much at ease in the presence of a
Chicago poetess with a practised--a somewhat too practised--laugh or a
fellow employee risen, like himself, to a point where society could see
him.

In due course Eagle Pass gave an entertainment (at the Mesquite Club) and
invited certain railroad officials and employees from the other side of
the river. Harboro was included among those invited, and he put on correct
evening dress, and rode over in a coach, and became a favorite in Eagle
Pass. He seemed rather big and serious for complete assimilation, but he
looked well with the club settings as a background, and his name appeared
later in the week in the Eagle Pass _Guide_, in the list headed "among
those present."

All of which he accepted without agitation, or without ceasing to be
Harboro himself all over.

He did not meet Sylvia Little at the Mesquite Club. If you had known
Sylvia and the Mesquite Club, you would laugh at so superfluous a
statement. Eagle Pass was pleasantly democratic, socially, but it could
not have been expected to stand for Sylvia.

People didn't know much about her (to her credit, at least) except that
she was pretty. She was wonderfully pretty, and in a way which was all the
more arresting when you came to consider her desert surroundings.

She had come, with her father, from San Antonio. They had taken a low,
homely little house, standing under its mesquite-tree, close to the
government reservation, where the flagstaff stood, and the cannon boomed
at sundown, and the soldiers walked their posts. Back of the house there
was a thicket of mesquites, and through this