They manufactured the most ridiculous excuses to ride away from the ranch, when it chanced that Cherry was out riding. When she was at home, they each and every one fell victim to all the ailments under the sun.

Cherry saw very little of Heftral during her first days at the post. He always left before she got up in the morning, and returned from his excavating work late in the afternoon. She met him, of course, at dinner, when they all sat at a long table, and in the living room afterward, but never alone. Cherry was quite aware of the humor with which he regarded her flirtation with the cowboys. She did not like his attitude, and wasted a thought now and then as to how she would punish him.

On the whole, however, she was too happy even to remember her father’s reason for fetching her out to the desert. The actual reasons for her peculiar happiness she had not yet analyzed.

It was all so new. She rode for hours every day, sometimes alone, which was a difficult thing to maneuver—and often with her father, and the cowboys. The weather was glorious; the desert strangely, increasingly impelling; the blue sky and white clouds, the vivid colors and magnificent formations of the rock walls had some effect she was loath to acknowledge.

When had she been so hungry and tired at nightfall? She went to bed very early because everybody did so, and she slept as never before. Her skin began to take on a golden brown, and she gained weight. Both facts secretly pleased her. The pace at home had kept her pale and thin. Cherry gazed in actual amazement and delight at the face that smiled back at her from the mirror. Once she mused: I’ll say this Painted Desert has got the beauty shops beaten all hollow.

Her father had asked her several times to ride over to Sagi Cañon, where Heftral was excavating. But Cherry had pretended indifference as to his movements. As a matter of fact, she was curious to see what his work was like—what in the world could make a young man prefer digging in the dust to her company? There was another reason why she would not go, and it was because the more she saw of Stephen Heftral and heard about him from the cowboys and Linn—who were outspoken in their praise—the better she liked him and the more she resented liking him.

For the present, however, the cowboys were more than sufficient for Cherry. They were an endless source of interest, fun, and wholesome admiration.

In ten days not a single one of them had attempted to hold her hand, let alone kiss her. Cherry would rather have liked them, one and all, to hold her hand, and she would not have run very far to keep from being kissed. But it began to dawn upon her that despite an utter prostration of each cowboy at her feet, so to speak, there was never even a hint of familiarity, such as was natural as breathing to the young men of her set.

First it struck Cherry as amusing. Then she sought to break it down. And before two weeks were up she began to take serious thought of something she had not supposed possible to the genus Homo, young or old, East or West.

Cherry did not care to be forced to delve into introspection, to perplex herself with the problem of modern youth. She had had quite enough of that back East. Papers, magazines, plays, sermons, and lectures, even the movies, had made a concerted attack upon the younger generation. It had been pretty sickening to Cherry. How good to get away from that atmosphere for a while. Perhaps here was a reason why she liked the West. But there seemed to be something working on her, which sooner or later she must face.

One afternoon Cherry returned from her ride earlier than usual, so that she did not have to hurry and dress for dinner. She had settled herself in the hammock when her father and Heftral rode in from the opposite direction. The hammock was hidden under the vines outside the living room window. They did not see Cherry and she was too lazy or languid to call to them.

A little later she heard them enter the living room.