"Good afternoon." They all took off their hats with the same formal
gravity as the horse moved forward, but turned back to their work again
before she was out of the field.


CHAPTER II


The ranch of Major Randolph lay on a rich falda of the Coast Range, and
overlooked the great wheat plains that the young girl had just left.
The house of wood and adobe, buried to its first story in rose-trees
and passion vines, was large and commodious. Yet it contained only the
major, his wife, her son and daughter, and the few occasional visitors
from San Francisco whom he entertained, and she tolerated.

For the major's household was not entirely harmonious. While a young
infantry subaltern at a Gulf station, he had been attracted by the
piquant foreign accent and dramatic gestures of a French Creole widow,
and--believing them, in the first flush of his youthful passion more
than an offset to the encumbrance of her two children who, with the
memory of various marital infidelities were all her late husband had
left her--had proposed, been accepted, and promptly married to her.
Before he obtained his captaincy, she had partly lost her accent, and
those dramatic gestures, which had accented the passion of their brief
courtship, began to intensify domestic altercation and the bursts
of idle jealousy to which she was subject. Whether she was revenging
herself on her second husband for the faults of her first is not known,
but it was certain that she brought an unhallowed knowledge of the
weaknesses, cheap cynicism, and vanity of a foreign predecessor, to sit