The Desert Valley

Helen, who knew her father, sighed and turned from him to Carr. Then her eyes wandered through the open door, across the flat lands and down to the distant hills of Desert Valley.

'I should not speak as I am going to speak,' Carr was saying, 'if matters were not exactly as they are. To begin with, I take it that I have been accepted as a friend. Hence you will forgive me if I appear to presume and will know that I have no love of interfering in another man's personal affairs. Then, I must say what I have to say now: in a few days I am leaving you. I've got to go to New York.'

'Oh,' said Helen. 'I am sorry.'

'You are kind to me,' he acknowledged gravely. 'And I am sorry to go. Unless you and your father will consent to come also. Now, I am going to have my say--and, Mr. Longstreet, I hope you will forgive me if I am assuming a privilege which is not mine. I take it that you have no great amount of ready cash. Further, that your income has been that of most college men, who are all underpaid--say, three or four or five thousand a year. I have talked with Nate Kemble about you. His concern is a tremendously big affair with head offices in New York. Kemble is a friend of mine: I own stock in his company: he will acknowledge, quite as I am prepared to acknowledge, that there is a place for an expert of your type in the company. And the place will pay you, from the jump, ten thousand dollars.'

Helen fairly gasped. Despite her father's talk of the extravagant sums he meant to wrest from the bowels of the earth, she had never dreamed of so princely an income for them. Longstreet, however, merely shook a smiling head.

'You're a real friend, John,' he said. 'But here we stick. And, when you come down to dollars and cents, I'll eat your new hat for you if I can't make ten times your ten thousand in the first year.'

Before such amazing confidence Carr stalled. But he did not give up; it wasn't his habit of thought to relinquish anything which he had undertaken. Still for a little he was silent, studying his man. Again Helen was staring out through the open door.

'Some one is coming,' she announced. Then, her tone quickening, 'It is Mr. Howard; I knew he would be riding over before night. I know his horse,' she explained hastily, flushing a trifle under Carr's eyes which told her that he was surprised that she could tell who it was at such a distance. 'It is the horse he rode the first time we ever saw him. There is some one with him. It looks like----'