up the monotony and carried it, scarcely interrupted by undefined
water-courses, to the faintly marked out horizon line of the remote bay.
Scattered and apparently motionless black spots on the meadows that gave
a dreary significance to the title of "the Crows" which the rancho bore,
and sudden gray clouds of sand-pipers on the marshes, that rose and
vanished down the wind, were the only signs of life. Even the white sail
of the early morning was gone.

She stood there until the aching of her straining eyes and the
stiffening of her limbs in the cold wind compelled her to seek the
sheltered warmth of the courtyard. Here she endeavored to make friends
with a bright-eyed lizard, who was sunning himself in the corridor; a
graceful little creature in blue and gold, from whom she felt at other
times she might have fled, but whose beauty and harmlessness solitude
had made known to her. With misplaced kindness she tempted it with
bread-crumbs, with no other effect than to stiffen it into stony
astonishment. She wondered if she should become like the prisoners
she had read of in books, who poured out their solitary affections on
noisome creatures, and she regretted even the mustang, which with the
buggy had disappeared under the charge of some unknown retainer on her
arrival. Was she not a prisoner? The shutterless windows, yawning doors,
and open gate refuted her suggestion, but the encompassing solitude and
trackless waste still held her captive. Poindexter had told her it was
four miles to the shanty; she might walk there. Why had she given her
word that she would remain at the rancho until he returned?

The long day crept monotonously away, and she welcomed the night
which shut out the dreary prospect. But it brought no cessation of
the harassing wind without, nor surcease of the nervous irritation its
perpetual and even activity wrought upon her. It haunted her pillow even