cause jealous agitation among the lilies of the field.

Tonia sat on the steps of the Espinosa ranch house flicking gloomily
with a quirt at a tuft of curly mesquite. She displayed a frown
and a contumelious lip, and endeavored to radiate an aura of
disagreeableness and tragedy.

"I hate railroads," she announced positively. "And men. Men pretend
to run them. Can you give any excuse why a trestle should burn? Ida
Bennet's hat is to be trimmed with violets. I shall not go one step
toward Cactus without a new hat. If I were a man I would get one."

Two men listened uneasily to this disparagement of their kind. One
was Wells Pearson, foreman of the Mucho Calor cattle ranch. The
other was Thompson Burrows, the prosperous sheepman from the Quintana
Valley. Both thought Tonia Weaver adorable, especially when she
railed at railroads and menaced men. Either would have given up his
epidermis to make for her an Easter hat more cheerfully than the
ostrich gives up his tip or the aigrette lays down its life. Neither
possessed the ingenuity to conceive a means of supplying the sad
deficiency against the coming Sabbath. Pearson's deep brown face and
sunburned light hair gave him the appearance of a schoolboy seized by
one of youth's profound and insolvable melancholies. Tonia's plight
grieved him through and through. Thompson Burrows was the more
skilled and pliable. He hailed from somewhere in the East originally;
and he wore neckties and shoes, and was made dumb by woman's presence.

"The big water-hole on Sandy Creek," said Pearson, scarcely hoping to
make a hit, "was filled up by that last rain."