Susan Lenox, Her Fall and Rise

"You are deserting me," protested Ernest.

"No, I'm not," returned little Felicia Preble. "I like you very much but I feel as if I'd like to sit in Roger's lap."

And in Roger's lap she sat, while the racing purple shadows on the yellow desert gradually grew black, until the yellow turned to lavender, and both gradually merged into a twilight that was silvered by star-glow before the last crimson disappeared in the west. She sat there long after Ernest went inside to read, in the same quiet that enwrapped Roger. It was a strange quiet for Roger; a quiet of sweetness and content that he had not known since his mother's death. With that warm, supple little body pressed against him, his mind for once left his work and paused to ponder on the loneliness of the past sixteen years and on the thrilling promise of the desert star-glow. No human being can be completely sane who does not pause at intervals to express the tenderness that marks humans from animals. But Roger did not know this.

It was six o'clock in the morning when the train pulled in to Archer's Springs and Ernest, Roger and Felicia alighted. They stood for a moment in silence after the train pulled out. They were apparently the only persons awake in the world.

"Where's Charley?" asked Felicia suddenly.

The station door opened and the baggage man, in blue overalls and jumper, appeared. He was frankly interested in the new arrivals and answered Ernest's question promptly.

"Preble? Sure! Dick Preble was here the first of the week. Told me he'd be in next week to meet the little girl. How'd you come a week early, sissy?"

Felicia's lip was quivering. "I don't know! Aunt Mary put me on the train and said Charley would meet me."

"Can we telephone them?" asked Ernest.

The baggage man grinned. "Telephone? Boys, come here a minute."

He led them to the other side of the concrete station where the view was unobstructed by the train shed, and pointed northeast.

"Take a look," he suggested.

The station platform ended in yellow sand. Across an open space were some one-story buildings; beyond these an indefinite level of sand that melted, at what distance one could not say, into a line of mountains that were black and crimson and at last snow-capped against the translucent blue of the morning sky.

"This road," said the baggage man, "goes along pretty good for eight or ten miles north, then it's nothing but a wagon track trail. If you follow it for twenty-five miles you reach Preble's mine. He says he's trying dry farming this spring. There ain't a living human being, except a few Injuns, between there and here. Sabez? And they ain't a brute thing but coyotes, and lizards and maybe wild burros, and so they ain't no call for a telephone."