Not far from the foot-hills floated a patch of foliage, checkered by the
roofs of the houses of an irrigation colony, hanging kitelike at the end
of the silver thread of a river whose waters had set gardens abloom in
sterile expanses. There seemed a refusal of intimacy with the one visible
symbol of its relations with the outer world; for the railroad, with its
lines of steel flashing across the gray levels, passed beyond the outer
edge of the oasis.

"This beats any valley I've seen yet," and the traveller spoke with the
confidence of one who is a connoisseur of Arizona valleys.

He paused for some time in hesitancy to take a farewell of the rapturous
vista. A hundred feet lower and the refraction of the light would present
it in different coloring and perspective. With his spell of visual
intoxication ran the consciousness of being utterly alone. But the egoism
of his isolation in the towering infinite did not endure; for the sound
of voices, a man's and a woman's, broke on his ear.

The man's was strident, disagreeable, persistent. Its timbre was such as
he had heard coming out of the doors of border saloons. The woman's was
quiet and resisting, its quality of youth peculiarly emphasized by its
restrained emotion.

Now the easy traveller took stock of his immediate surroundings, which
had interested him only as a foothold and vantage-point for the panorama
that he had been breathing in. Here, of all conceivable places, he was in
danger of becoming eavesdropper to a conversation which was evidently
very personal. Rounding the escarpment at his elbow he saw, on a shelf of
decaying granite, two waiting ponies. One had a Mexican saddle of the
cowboy type. The other had an Eastern side-saddle, which struck him as