"Good evenin', Miss M'lissy," he cried, sweeping his sombrero as low as the stirrup. "_Buenos tardes_, _Senor_ Norris," she flung back gayly. Sitting at ease in the saddle, he leisurely looked her over with eyes that smoldered behind half-shuttered lids. To most of her world she was in spirit still more boy than woman, but before his bold, possessive gaze her long lashes wavered to the cheeks into which the warm blood was beating. Her long, free lines were still slender with the immaturity of youth, her soul still hesitating reluctantly to cross the border to womanhood toward which Nature was pushing her so relentlessly. From a fund of experience Philip Norris read her shrewdly, knew how to evoke the latent impulses which brought her eagerly to the sex duel. "Playing off for sick," he scoffed. "I'm not," she protested. "Never get sick. It's just a sprained ankle." "Sho! I guess you're Miss Make Believe; just harrowing the feelings of your beaux." "The way you talk! I haven't got any beaux. The boys are just my friends." "Oh, just friends! And no beaux. My, my! Not a single sweetheart in all this wide open country. Shall I go rope you one and bring him in, _compadre_?" "No!" she exploded. "I don't want any. I'm not old enough yet." Her dancing eyes belied the words. "Now I wouldn't have guessed it. You look to me most ready to be picked." He rested his weight on the farther stirrup and let his lazy smile mock her. "My estimate would be sixteen. I'll bet you're every day of that." "I only lack three months of being eighteen," she came back indignantly. "You don't say! You'll ce'tainly have to be advertising for a husband soon, Miss Three-Quarters-Past-Seventeen. Maybe an ad in the Mesa paper would help. You ain't so awful bad looking." "I'll let you write it. What would you say?" she demanded, a patch of pink standing out near the curve of the cheek bone. He swung from the saddle and flung the reins to the ground. With jingling spurs he came up the steps and sat on the top one, his back against a pillar. Boldly his admiring eyes swept her. "_Nina_, I couldn't do the subject justice. Honest, I haven't got the vocabulary." "Oh, you!" Laughter was in the eyes that studied him with a side tilt of the chin. "That's a fine way to get out of it when your bluff is called." He leaned back against the post comfortably and absorbed the beauty of the western horizon. The sun had just set behind a saddle of the Galiuros in a splash of splendor. All the colors of the rainbow fought for supremacy in a brilliant-tinted sky that blazed above the fire-girt peaks. Soon dusk would slip down over the land and tone the hues to a softer harmony. A purple sea would flow over the hills, to be in turn displaced by a deep, soft violet. Then night, that night of mystery and romance which transforms the desert to a thing of incredible wonder!