the miles and miles of that silent, dreadful land her face grew sad
and wistful and in her eyes there was an expression that the Seer
sometimes said made him think of the desert.

Gentle Mrs. Worth had lived just long enough to leave an indelible
impression of her simple genuineness upon the life of the child, who
had come to take in her heart the place left vacant by the death of
her own baby girl. Since the loss of her second mother the girl had
lived with no woman companion save the Indian woman Ynez, and it was
the Seer rather than Jefferson Worth to whom she turned in fullest
confidence and trust. The childish instinct that had led the baby to
the big engineer's arms that night on the Desert had never wavered
through the years when she was growing into womanhood, and the Seer,
whose work after the completion of the S. and C. called him to many
parts of the West, managed every few months a visit to the girl he
loved as his own. To Mr. Worth who, as far as it was possible for
him to be, was in all things a father to her, Barbara gave in return
a daughter's love, but she had never been able to enter into the
life of the banker as she entered into the life of the engineer. So
it was the Seer who became, after Mrs. Worth, the dominant influence
in forming the character of the motherless girl. His dreams of
Reclamation, his plans and efforts to lead the world to recognize
the value of that great work, with his failures and disappointments,
she shared at an early age with peculiar sympathy, for she had not
been kept in ignorance of the tragic part the desert had played in
her own life. Particularly did The King's Basin Desert interest her.
She felt that, in a way, it belonged to her; that she belonged to
it. It was _her_ Desert. Its desolation she shared; its waiting she
understood; something of its mystery colored her life; something
within her answered to its call. It was her Desert; she feared it;