"Pearl!" he cried aloud, and it was like some strong affirmation of life. He lifted his eyes, bold and unafraid, as an eagle's, to the sun-flooded, brazen, blue heavens. Time stood still. He had drunk at a new fountain--love, and, although his thirst was still unquenched, he was eternal youth. The heart of life breathed through him. He looked upon the sky, a man unconquered, unbeaten, undaunted by life. He was its master. Did she ask the snow peaks yonder? He would gather them as footstools for her little feet. Was it gold she desired? It should be as dust for her hands to scatter to the winds. Was it name, place, state, she asked? They should be plucked forthwith from a supine world and offered her as a nosegay.

Again, confidently now, he stooped and kissed her lips. It seemed to him that roses and stars fell about them. "You love me, Pearl," he had cried, in incredulous joy, "you love me."

For answer she smiled sweetly, ardently into his eyes: "'Love me to-day,'" she sang, nestling close to his heart.

CHAPTER IV

It was almost a week before Bob Flick returned, and during that time Pearl saw Hanson almost constantly, although to do so she had continually to match her quickness and subtlety against that of her father and Hughie; but even while she and her father met each other with move and counter-move, check and checkmate, it was characteristic of both of them that Hanson's obvious infatuation and her equally obvious return of it were never mentioned between them.

With Hughie it was different, and Pearl met his petulant remonstrance, his boyish withdrawal of the usual confiding intimacy which existed between them, with laughter and caresses. As for Mrs. Gallito, she alone was unchanged, apparently quite oblivious to storm conditions in the mental atmosphere. But this was not unusual; when matters of importance were transacted in the Gallito household Mrs. Gallito did not count.

But these disturbing conditions could not daunt Pearl's high spirits; she was like flame, and the light of her eye, the glow on her cheek, the buoyancy of her step were not all due to the ardor of her loving and the joy of being ardently loved. There was also the zest of intrigue.

And, oh! what a mad and splendid game she and Hanson played together!

He rose to her every soaring audacity; they took almost impossible chances as lightly as a hunter takes a hurdle. The lift of her eyelash, an imperceptibly significant gesture, a casual word spoken in conversation, these Hanson met with an incredible quickness of understanding. It was a game at which he was master, and which he had played many times before, but never had his intuitions been so keen, his always rapid comprehension been so stimulated.

Beneath the eye of another master of intrigue, Gallito, watchful as a spider, they met and loved until, it seemed to Hanson, that the whole, wide desert rang with their glorious laughter. And through it all Francisco Gallito sat and smoked and sipped his cognac imperturbably; apparently unruffled by defeat, a defeat--the Pearl with subtle femininity saw to that--which was not without its elements of ignominy.

But now Bob Flick had returned and had sat late with Gallito the night before, talking, although Mrs. Gallito, who tendered this information to her daughter, had not been able to overhear any part of their conversation, in spite of her truly persistent efforts to do so. These circ.u.mstances, and results which would probably ensue when a definite course of action had been decided upon, occupied the Pearl's thoughts as she stood at the gate gazing out on the gray wastes spread before her in the broad morning sunshine. Lolita was perched on the fence beside her, swaying back and forth, muttering to herself and occasionally dipping down perilously in a curious effort to see the garden upside down through the fence palings.

Pearl turned at last from her contemplation of the subject which absorbed her attention, and smiled as her glance fell upon the gaudy tail, the only part of Lolita now visible, although, even then, the horse-shoe frown, which showed faintly on her smooth forehead, a facsimile of the one graven deep on her father's wrinkled brow, did not disappear.

"They've got it in for us, Lolita--Rudolf and me." She laughed outright now. Pearl's laughter was ever a disagreeable surprise; low, harsh, unpleasantly vibrant, and in strange dissonance to her soft, contralto voice. "Lay you any odds you say, Lolita, that it's poor old Bob that's got to be the goat."

The parrot swung back to a normal position with surprising rapidity.

"Bob, Bob," she croaked. "Mi jasmin, Pearl, mi corazon," and she gazed at her mistress with wrinkled, cynical eyes.

"Yes, Bob's got to do the telling." Pearl confided more to Lolita than she ever did in her fellow beings. "Oh, Rudolf, this is where you get knifed! They've been laying for you right from the first. When Bob's got to do a thing, he never wastes any time; he'll be along sure this morning. I guess we'll just wait right here and catch him."

Lolita hopped clumsily on to Pearl's shoulder and tweaked her ear. "h.e.l.l and d.a.m.nation!" she muttered, and then sang:

"Love me to-day, Love me an hour."

Pearl shrugged impatiently. "Shut up!" she cried, and resting her chin in her cupped hands gazed over the sparkling, shimmering plain, where all unshadowed day-beams seemed to gather as pure light and then, as if fused in some magic alembic, became color. There, the ineffable command: "Let there be light!" included all. It is only in the silence and light of the desert that men may fully realize that the universe is one, that light is music and music is color and color is fragrance, undifferentiated in the eternal harmony of beauty.

Pearl's eyes drank the desert, unconsciously seeking there in its haunting enigmas and unsolved mysteries an answer to the enigma of self.

Like life, like truth, like love, like all realities viewed from the angle of human vision, the desert is a paradox. Its vast emptiness is more than full; its unashamed sterility is but the simile for unmeasured fecundity.

For an hour thus she leaned and gazed, Lolita restlessly walking back and forth, singing and croaking, until, at last, as Pearl had predicted, Bob Flick appeared, a fact not unheralded by Lolita's cries; but Pearl did not alter her languid pose, nor even turn her head to greet him. She was watching a whirling column of sand, polished and white as a colossal marble pillar.

"It's kind of early for them to begin, ain't it, Bob?" she remarked casually.

"Yes." He paused by the gate, leaning one arm on it, and in the swift glance she cast at him from the corners of her eyes she could see that his expressionless face looked worn, the lines about the mouth seemed to have deepened and the eyes were heavy, as if he had not slept.

Lolita had, as usual, perched upon his shoulder, and was murmuring in his ear.

"Say, Pearl," Flick spoke again after an interval of silence, "I wish you'd take a walk with me. I--I got something on my mind that I want to talk about."

"All right," she acquiesced readily, the nicker of a smile about her lips quickly suppressed. "I'll be ready in a minute, as soon as I get my hat."

They walked through the village, the great broken wall of the mountains rising before them, deceptively near, and yet austerely remote, dazzling snow domes and spires crowning the rock-b.u.t.tressed slopes and appearing sometimes to float, as unsubstantial clouds, in an atmosphere of all commingling and contrasting blues and purples. Presently they turned into a lane of mesquite trees. The growth of these trees was thick on either side and the branches arched above their heads. They had stepped in a footfall's s.p.a.ce into a new world. It was one of those surprising, almost unbelievable contrasts in which the desert abounds.

A moment before they had gazed upon the mountains, spectacularly vivid in the clear atmosphere, white peaks and azure skies, green foothills, serrated with black shadows. Behind them the sun-flooded white glare of the great, waste place and behold! all these vanished as they set their feet in this garden inclosed, this bower as green and quiet as the lane of a distant and far softer and more fertile country.

Pearl never made any conventional attempts at conversation, and for a time they walked in silence through those fairy aisles where the light fell golden-green and the sun only filtered in tiny broken disks through the delicate lace of the mesquite leaves. Then Flick spoke:

"Pearl, I got something to say to you, and it's about the hardest thing I ever tried to do, because I know," his mouth twisted a little, "that you're not going to like me any better for it."

"What do you do it for then, Bob?" she asked, and there was more than a half impatient mockery in her tone, there was wonder.

"I got to," he said doggedly. "I guess there's no sense in it, but, whether you like it or not, I always got to do what seems the best thing for you."

It was an inflexible att.i.tude, an ideal of conduct unfalteringly held, and uncompromisingly adhered to, and she knew it. Therefore, she shrugged her shoulders resignedly, the faint horse-shoe frown again appearing in her forehead. "Well--go on, then," her voice as resigned as her shoulders, "and get it over."

"It's this--" he hesitated and looked down at her a moment, and the tenderness his glance expressed she did not lift her eyes to see and would not have noticed if she had; "Pearl, Hanson ain't on the level."

She laughed that slightly grating, almost unpleasant, laugh of hers.

"It's no secret to me, Bob, that several of you are thinking that."

"We got cause to," he answered moodily; and then, as if struck by something in her words, he looked at her quickly. "Has your Pop told you anything?" There was surprise in both glance and voice.

"Not a thing," she a.s.sured him, scornfully amused by the question, "but there are some things that don't have to be told. Do you suppose I haven't caught on to the way you've all been acting?"

Again he looked his surprise. "We all been acting?" he repeated.

"Yes. I've seen things and I've felt them. Oh, you might just as well out with it, Bob. What is it all about?"

He stared unseeing down the sun-sifted dusk of the green lane. Here the desert silence was like a benediction of peace, broken now and then by the faint, shrill note of an insect, or the occasional soft, mournful plaint of a dove.

"Pearl, you can laugh at me if you want to, and say I'm jealous. That's true, I am. I can't help it; but this time it wasn't all that. I got to size up men quick; that was my business for a good many years, and the first minute I set eyes on Hanson I knew he wasn't straight. And then, Hughie--"

"And so you stirred up Pop to watch him?" she broke in quick as a flash.

"No," he answered patiently, "no, but Hughie's feelings got so strong about him that your Pop kind of woke up and got to studying him, and then he saw what--what neither of you tried to hide," there was bitterness in his tone, "and then he kind of remembered something he'd heard up in Colina, and--"

"And so you've been up to Colina tracking round after a woman." Her verbal strokes were swift and hard as a flail. And again Flick started in surprise. His cheeks flushed faintly, his jaw set.

"What you mean, Pearl? Has he been having me trailed? I don't believe it."

"No," she drawled, taking a malicious amus.e.m.e.nt in this unwonted perturbation on his part, "he hasn't. You slipped away so quiet and easy that you didn't stop to say good-by, even to me. Were you afraid I'd put him on to it?"

She did not hesitate to plant her banderillos where they would sting most, and Flick winced at this imputation which struck so near home.

"How did you know about the woman, then?" he asked quickly.

Pearl lifted her head and laughed aloud, and, at the unwonted sound breaking the desert silence, three pairs of brilliant eyes gazing through the screening mesquite branches vanished and the gray, shadowy figures of three coyotes disappeared as noiselessly as they had come.