Among these was Grant Hickman, civil engineer, New York, lately captain in the First Division overseas. Arizona bound and west of the Ohio River for the first time in his thirty years, Hickman had broken his journey by a day’s stopover in El Paso. He had given Juarez a whirl, decided the kind of life he saw across the International Bridge was spurious and of little worth, and now was entraining again for his destination some four hundred miles to the westward. He gave the porter his bags to stow for him according to the directions scribbled on his Pullman ticket and began a lazy pacing of the platform, his eye alert for the colour and the bustle of it all. The blending of two races, of widely differing civilizations, here in this sturdy city gave Hickman’s restless imagination a smart fillip. He saw men with gaily coloured blankets worn as cloaks over their shoulders like prayer shawls in a synagogue; Indians with ornaments of beaten silver and raw turquoise hasps on their belts had their shoulders planted against solid brick walls with a grace born only of perfect indolence. All great stuff--regular musical show background. On his first lap down the platform the New York man’s eyes rested momentarily on two figures standing in the drip of one of the car icers’ laden pushcarts. A girl and a man; she hatless as she had left the car for a stroll, the man all gesticulating hands and eloquently moving shoulders. Hickman caught a scrap of the man’s fervid speech as he strolled past; it was in a foreign tongue, liquid--almost lisping--with its softly rolled r’s and a peculiar singing intonation at the upward lift of each period. Spanish undoubtedly. Just an over-shoulder glimpse of a thin, dark face in sharp profile confirmed Grant in his guess at the speaker’s nationality. The girl’s bared head attracted his appreciative eye; it bore a glory of wondrously burning red hair, coiled in great masses, vividly alive. Grant turned his corner at the platform’s end and began to retrace his steps, consciously bearing in the direction of the beacon hair. When he was still twenty paces off he saw that the swarthy man had gripped one of the girl’s wrists and that his hawk face was pushed close to hers in what might have been an access of fury or of pleading. Grant quickened his pace instinctively; he did not like the looks of that man’s talon grip on a girl’s wrist. He paused a decent distance from the twain and made a pretence of lighting a cigarette while his eyes glanced steadily over his cupped palms.