What ensued upon the arrival of the auto nearly drove the watcher, shirtless as he was, out to two-fisted intervention. Urgo, the salamander, evidently was of a mind to make a third in the car. Grant saw his humped shoulders and expostulating hands, saw Benicia tilt her chin as she gave him some cold refusal. But the colonel calmly stowed his suitcase by the side of the trunk in the box body, evidently planning to use it as a seat. Again Benicia, now in her place by the side of the Indian giant, turned to give him peremptory refusal. The Indian at the wheel had his engine going and was sitting statue-like, utterly detached from the quarrel. Urgo stepped on the rear wheel’s hub and had one hand on the floor of the box body when one of the Indian’s hands flashed up the spark even as his foot went down on the gear pedal. The crazy little car leaped like a singed cat. Colonel Urgo cut a neat arc, hit the road on his back and rolled over just in time to escape receiving amidships his suitcase, which the Indian driver had dropped from the car without turning his head. In the Pullman washroom Grant collapsed to the seat and smeared soap into his eyes while he tried to check tears of laughter. The fall of the peppery little Spaniard had been colossal, and he guessed it had been wrought at the quick prompting of the spirited girl in khaki. What a wonder she was! All laughter and bubbling spirits one minute; quick as a leopard to strike the next. “Man”--Grant addressed a beaming face in the glass--“man, always lay your bets on a red-headed girl!” That minute of communion with a smiling confidant was an important one in the life of Grant Hickman, cautious bachelor. For it came to him with the force of a hammer blow that he wanted and must have this vivid creature of the desert named Benicia O’Donoju. Girl of fire and sparkle--of a spirit free and piquant as the winds that blow across the wastes--unspoiled of cities and the stale conventions of drawing rooms. Oh, he would have her! Gone she might be, out into a land beyond his ken. Unguessed barriers of circumstance, of others’ intervention, might have to be scaled; but somehow, somewhere, Grant Hickman was going to find and win Benicia O’Donoju. Love at first sight--old-fashioned, mid-Victorian stuff, says the cynical débutante over her cigarette and outlaw cocktail. In New York tearooms and Washington ballrooms, quite so. Where girls of twenty must know the sum that stands in bank to Clarence’s credit, before Clarence is marked down as eligible, love at first sight is, in truth, dead as the dodo bird. Even so, spirit still calls to spirit and like leaps to like most all the world over. It is only where fungus spots stain the garden that love will not bloom.