The shades of night were already falling around Mohawk Station when we reached it. It was quite a pretentious house, built of _adobe_, and boasting of but one story, of course; but it is not every one in Arizona who can build a house with four rooms,--if the doors _do_ consist of old blankets, and the floor and ceiling, like the walls, of mud. A discharged soldier kept the station now--a large yellow dog his sole companion. The man slept on the same bed that had borne Hendricks's corpse, and the cudgel, with the murdered man's blood dried on it, was lying at the foot of it. "And where is his grave?" I asked. The man's eye travelled slowly over the desolate landscape before us. There were sand, verde, and cactus, on one side of us, and there were sand, verde, and cactus, on the other. "Well, really now, I couldn't tell. You see, I wasn't here when they put him in the ground, and I haven't thought of his grave since I come. Fact is, I've got to keep my eyes open for live Greasers and Pache-Indians, and don't get much time to hunt up dead folks's graves!" _LONE LINDEN._ "It is just the place for you; Clara will find it sufficiently romantic, Miss Barbara can have Snowball and Kickup both with her, and you, dear friend, will be pleased because the rest of us are." The letter was signed "Christine Ernst;" and Mrs. Wardor, when she had finished reading, continued in her quiet, even tones: "What an unaccountable being she is; I thought her cold and unfeeling, because she dismissed that fine young fellow so unceremoniously, when we all thought her heart was bound up in him." "Ah, me!" sighed Clara, fair of face, blue-eyed, and with feathery curls of the palest yellow. "How little we know of the sorrow that sits silent in our neighbor's breast. The sentiment--" "Oh, bother sentiment!" broke in Miss Barbara, impetuously, flinging back the heavy braids of unquestionably red hair that had strayed over her shoulder. "Daisy, my snowball, imagine, if you can, a large lot, a meadow, or paddock, or something with grass, for Kickup, you and me! Oh, won't it be jolly, though?" And seizing the sweet Daisy, a squat, broad-faced Indian girl, whom Barbara's father, an army contractor, had picked up somewhere around Fort Yuma, they executed a species of war-dance that sent chairs, crickets, and bouquet-stands flying, and caused Mrs. Wardor and her other companion to exchange significant head-shakings. Having suddenly loosed her hold of Daisy in the wildest of the dance, and sent her spinning into the corner where her head struck the whatnot, Miss Barbara approached the elder lady, panting, and with deep contrition.