the voices of men, faint, quick sounds against the tolling of the bell. Then suddenly all was very still once more; Ignacio had allowed the Captain to resume his silent brooding, and came to her.
"I must go to see who it is," he apologized. "Then I will know better how to ring for him. The sheepman from Las Palmas, I bet you. For did I not see when just now I passed the Casa Blanca that he was a little drunk with Señor Galloway's whiskey? And does not every one know he sold many sheep and that means much money these days? Si, señorita; it will be the sheepman from Las Palmas."
He was gone, slouching along again and in no haste now that he had fulfilled his first duty. What haste could there possibly be since, sheepman from Las Palmas or another, he was dead and therefore must wait upon Ignacio Chavez's pleasure? Somehow she gleaned this thought from his manner and therefore did not speak as she watched him depart.
That portion of the street which she could see from her bench was empty, the dust settling, thinning, disappearing. Farther down toward the Casa Blanca she could imagine the little knots of men asking one another what had happened and how; the chief actor in this fragment of human drama she could picture lying inert, uncaring that it was for him that a bell had tolled and would toll again, that men congregated curiously.
In a little while Ignacio would return, shuffling, smoking a dangling cigarette, his hat cocked against the sun; he would give her full particulars and then return to his bell. … She had come to San Juan to make a home here, to become a part of it, to make it a portion of her. To arrive upon a day like this was no pleasant omen; it was too dreadfully like taking a room in a house only to hear the life rattling out of a man beyond a partition. She was suddenly averse to hearing Ignacio's details; there came a quick desire to set her back to the town whose silence on the heels of uproar crushed her. Rising hastily, she hurried down the weed-bordered walk, out at the broken gate, and turned toward the mountains. One glance down the street as she crossed it showed her what she had expected: a knot of men at the door of the Casa Blanca, another small group at a window, evidently taking stock of a broken window-pane.
The sun, angry and red, was hanging low over a distant line of hills, the flat lands were already drawing about them a thin, faintly colorful haze. She had put on her hat and, like Ignacio, had set it a little to the side of her head, feeling her cheeks burning when the direct rays found them. The fine, loose soil was sifting into her low slippers before she had gone a score of paces. When she came back she would unpack her trunk and get out a sensible pair of boots. No doubt she was dressed ridiculously, but then the heat had tempted her. …
A curious matter presented itself to her. In the little groups upon the street she had not seen a single woman. Were there none in San Juan? Was this some strange, altogether masculine, community into which she had stumbled? Then she remembered how the bell-ringer had mentioned Mrs. Engle, the banker's wife, and his daughter and Mrs. Struve and others. Besides all this she had a letter to Mrs. Engle which she was going to present this evening. …
She was thinking of anything in the world but of a tragedy not yet grown cold, so near her that for a little it had seemed to embrace her. Now it was almost as though it had not occurred. The world was all unchanged about her, the town somnolent. She had shuddered as Ignacio played upon his bell; but the shudder was rather from the bell's resonant eloquence than from any more vital cause. A man she had never seen, whose name even she did not know, had been shot by another man unknown to her; she had heard only the shots, she had seen nothing. True, she had heard also a voice crying out, but she sensed that it had been the voice of an onlooker. She felt ashamed that the episode did not move her more.
As, earlier in the afternoon, she had been drawn from the heat of her room at Struve's hotel by the shade to be found in the Mission garden, so now did a long, wavering line of cottonwoods beckon to her. In files which turned eastward or westward here and there only to come back to the general northerly trend, they indicated where an arroyo writhed down, tortured serpent-wise, from the mountains. Through their foliage she had glimpsed the Engle home. She expected to find running water under their shade, that and an attendant coolness.
But the arroyo proved to be dry and hot, a gash in the dry bosom of the earth, its bottom strewn with smooth pebbles and sand and a very sparse, unattractive vegetation, stunted and harsh. And it was almost as hot here as on San Juan's street; into the shade crept the heat-waves of the dry, scorched air.
Led by the line of cottonwoods she found a little path and followed it, experiencing a vague relief to have the town at her back. She knew that distances deceived the eye in this bleak land, and yet she thought that before dark she could reach the hills, where perhaps there were a few languid flowers and pools, and return just tired enough to eat and go to sleep. She rather thought that she would postpone her call on the Engles until to-morrow.
"It's mañana-land, after all," she told herself with a quick smile.
Half an hour later she found a spot where the trees stood in a denser growth, looking greener, more vigorous … less thirsty. She could fancy the great roots, questing far downward through the layers of dry soil, thrusting themselves almost with a human, passionate eagerness into the water they had found. Here she threw herself down, lying upon her back, gazing up through the branches and leaves.
Never until now had she known the meaning of utter stillness. She saw a bird, a poor brown, unkempt little being; it had no song to offer the silence, and in a little flew away listlessly. She had seen a rabbit, a big, gaunt, uncomely wretch, disappearing silently among the clumps of brush.
Her spirit, essentially bright and happy, had striven hard with a new form of weariness all day. Not only was she coming into another land than that which she knew and understood, she was entering another phase of her life. She had chosen voluntarily, without advice or suggestion; she had had her reasons and they had seemed sufficient; they were still sufficient. She had chosen wisely; she held to that, her judgment untroubled. But that stubbornly recurrent sense that with the old landmarks she had abandoned the old life, that both in physical fact and in spiritual and mental actuality she was at the threshold of an unguessed, essentially different life, was disquieting. There is no getting away from an old basic truth that a man's life is so strongly influenced as almost to be moulded by his environment; there was uneasiness in the thought that here one's existence might grow to resemble his habitat, taking on the gray tone and monotony and bleak barrenness of this sun-smitten land.
Yielding a little already to the command laid upon breathing nature hereabouts, she was lying still, her hands lax, her thoughts taking unto themselves something of the character of the listless, songless brown bird's flight. She had come here to-day following in the footsteps of other men and a few women. Her own selection of San Juan was explicable; the thing to wonder at was what had given the hardihood to the first men to stop here and make houses and then homes? Later she would know; the one magic word of the desert lands: water. For San Juan, standing midway between the railroad and the more tempting lands beyond the mountains, had found birth because here was a mud-hole for cradle; down under the sand were fortuitous layers of impervious clay cupping to hold much sweet water.
The slow tolling of a bell came billowing out through the silence. The girl sat up. It was the Captain. Never, it seemed to her, had she heard anything so mournful. Ignacio had informed himself concerning all details and had returned to the garden at the Mission. The man was dead, then. There could be no doubt as one listened to the measured sorrowing of the big bell.
She got to her feet and, walking swiftly, moved on, still farther from San Juan. The act was without premeditation; her whole being was insistent upon it. She wondered if it was the sheepman from Las Palmas; if he had, perhaps, a wife and children. Then she stopped suddenly; a new thought had come to her. Strange, inexplicable even, it had not suggested itself before. She wondered who the other man was, the man who had done the killing. And what had happened to him? Had he fled? Had other men grappled with him, disarmed him,
