for any particular purpose. I was on a holiday. I'd been
on a big job up in Colorado and was rather done up, and, as there were
some prospects in New Mexico I wanted to see, I hit south, drifting
through Santa Fé and Silver City, until I found myself way down on the
southern edge of Arizona. It was still hot down there--hot as blazes--it
was about the first of September--and the rattlesnakes and the scorpions
were still as active as crickets. I knew a chap that had a cattle outfit
near the Mexican border, so I dropped in on him one day and stayed
two weeks. You see, he was lonely. Had a passion for theatres and
hadn't seen a play for five years. My second-hand gossip was rather a
godsend. But finally I got tired of talking about Mary Mannering, and
decided to start north again. He bade me good-by on a little hill near his
place. 'See here!' he said suddenly, looking toward the west. 'If you go
a trifle out of your way you'll strike Los Pinos, and I wish you would.
It's a little bit of a dump of the United Copper Company's, no good, I'm
thinking, but the fellow in charge is a friend of mine. He's got his wife
there. They're nice people--or used to be. I haven't seen them for ten
years. They say he drinks a little--well, we all do. Maybe you could
write me how she--I mean, how he is getting on?' And he turned red. I
saw how the land lay, and as a favor to him I said I would.
"It was eighty miles away, and I drifted in there one night on top of a
tired cow-horse just at sundown. You know how purple--violet,
really--those desert evenings are. There was violet stretching away as
far as I could see, from the faint violet at my stirrups to the deep,
almost black violet of the horizon. Way off to the north I could make
out the shadow of some big hills that had been ahead of me all day. The
town, what there was of it, lay in a little gully. Along its single street
there were a few lights shining like small yellow flowers. I asked my
way of a Mexican, and he showed me up to where the Whitneys--that
name will do as well as any--lived, in a decent enough sort of bungalow,
it would seem, above the gully. He left me there, and I went forward
and rapped at the door. Light shone from between the cracks of a
near-by shutter, and I could hear voices inside--a man's voice mostly,
hoarse and high-pitched. Then a Chinaman opened the door for me and
I had a look inside, into a big living-room beyond. It was civilized all
right enough, pleasantly so to a man stepping out of two days of desert
and Mexican adobes. At a glance I saw the rugs on the polished floor,
and the Navajo blankets about, and a big table in the centre with a
shaded lamp and magazines in rows; but the man in riding-clothes
standing before the empty fire-place wasn't civilized at all, at least not
at that moment. I couldn't see the woman, only the top of her head
above the back of a big chair, but as I came in I heard her say,
'Hush!--Jim!--please!' and I noticed that what I could see of her hair
was of that fine true gold you so seldom find. The man stopped in the
middle of a sentence and swayed on his feet, then he looked over at me
and came toward me with a sort of bulldog, inquiring look. He was a
big, red-faced, blond chap, about forty, I should say, who might once
have been handsome. He wasn't now, and it didn't add to his beauty that
he was quite obviously fairly drunk. 'Well?' he said, and blocked my
way.
"'I'm a friend of Henry Martin's,' I answered. 'I've got a letter for you.' I
was beginning to get pretty angry.
"'Henry Martin?' He laughed unsteadily. 'You'd better give it to my
wife over there. She's his friend. I hardly know him.' I don't know when
I'd seen a man I disliked as much at first sight.
"There was a rustle from the other side of the room, and Mrs. Whitney
came toward us. I avoided her unattractive husband and took her hand,
and I understood at once whatever civilizing influences there were
about the bungalow we were in. Did you ever do that--ever step out of
nowhere, in a wild sort of country, and meet suddenly a man or a
woman who might have come straight from a pleasant, well-bred room
filled with books and flowers and quiet, nice

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