fetch this down to the house," she demanded imperiously.
"What's the good of my finding you here in Goldite if you don't do
nothing for your country?"

Van shouldered the sack.

"What are you doing here anyhow?" said he, "--up before breakfast and
busy as a hen scratching for one chicken."

"Come on," she answered, starting briskly towards a new white building,
off the main thoroughfare, eastward. "I live here--start my
boarding-house today. I'm going to get rich. Every room's furnished
and every bed wanted as fast as I can make 'em up. Have you had your
breakfast?"

"Say, you're my Indian," answered Van. "I've got you two customers
already. You've got to take them in and give them your best if you
turn someone else inside out to do it."

Mrs. Dick paused suddenly.

"Bronson Van Buren! You're stuck on some woman at last!"

"At last?" said Van. "Haven't I always been stuck after you?"

Mrs. Dick resumed her brisk locomotion.

"Snakes alive!" she concluded explosively. "She's respectable, of
course? But you said two. Now see here, Van, no Mormon games with me!"

"Her _maid_--it's her maid that's with her," Van explained. "Don't
jump down my throat till I grease it."

"Her maid!" Mrs. Dick said no more as to that. The way she said it
was enough. They had come to the door of her newly finished house, a
clean, home-like place from which a fragrance of preparing breakfast
flowed like a ravishing nectar. "Where are they now?" she demanded
impatiently. "Wherever they are it ain't fit for a horse! Why don't
you go and fetch 'em?"

Van put the bag inside the door, then his hands on Mrs. Dick's
shoulders.

"I'll bet your mother was a little red firecracker and your father a
bottle of seltzer," he said. Then off he went for Beth.

She was not, of course, at "home" when he arrived at the place he had
found the previous evening. Disturbed for a moment by her absence, he
presently discerned her, off there westward on the hill from which she
was making a survey of the camp.

Three minutes after he was climbing up the slope and she turned and
looked downward upon him.

"By heavens!" he said beneath his breath, "--what beauty!"

The breeze was molding her dress upon her rounded form till she seemed
like the statue of a goddess--a goddess of freedom, loveliness, and
joy, sculptured in the living flesh--a figure vibrant with glowing
health and youth, startlingly set in the desert's gray austerity.