his useless pursuit, he rounded a bush, dropped his whip and stood,
voiceless, motionless, the capacity of his powers consumed by the act
of breathing and preserving the perpendicular.

Behind the bush stood Panchita O'Brien, scorning to fly. She was
nineteen, the oldest of the raiders. Her night-black hair was gathered
back in a wild mass and tied with a scarlet ribbon. She stood, with
reluctant feet, yet nearer the brook than to the river; for childhood
had environed and detained her.

She looked at Dry Valley Johnson for a moment with magnificent
insolence, and before his eyes slowly crunched a luscious berry
between her white teeth. Then she turned and walked slowly to the
fence with a swaying, conscious motion, such as a duchess might make
use of in leading a promenade. There she turned again and grilled Dry
Valley Johnson once more in the dark flame of her audacious eyes,
laughed a trifle school-girlishly, and twisted herself with pantherish
quickness between the pickets to the O'Brien side of the wild gourd
vine.

Dry Valley picked up his whip and went into his house. He stumbled as
he went up the two wooden steps. The old Mexican woman who cooked his
meals and swept his house called him to supper as he went through the
rooms. Dry Valley went on, stumbled down the front steps, out the gate
and down the road into a mesquite thicket at the edge of town. He sat
down in the grass and laboriously plucked the spines from a prickly
pear, one by one. This was his attitude of thought, acquired in the
days when his problems were only those of wind and wool and water.

A thing had happened to the man--a thing that, if you are eligible,