Helen May stood on the knobby, brown rock pinnacle that formed the head of Sunlight Basin and stared resentfully out over the baked desert and the forbidding hills and the occasional grassy hollows that stretched away and away to the skyline. So clear was the air that every slope, every hollow, every acarpous hilltop lay pitilessly revealed to her unfriendly eyes, until the sheer immensity of distance veiled its barrenness in a haze of tender violet. The sky was blue; deeply, intensely blue, with little clouds like flakes of bleached cotton floating aimlessly here and there. In a big, wild, unearthly way it was beautiful beyond any words which human beings have coined. Helen May felt its bigness, its wildness, perhaps also its beauty, though the beauties of the desert land do not always appeal to alien eyes. She felt its bigness and its wildness; and she who had lived the cramped life of the town resented both, because she had no previous experience by which to measure any part of it. Also, she summed up all her resentment and her complete sense of bafflement at its bigness in one vehement sentence that lacked only one word of being a curse. "Darn such a country!" is what she said, gritting the words between her teeth. "See anything of 'em?" bellowed Vic from the spring below, where he was engaged in dipping up water with a tomato can and pouring it over his head, shivering ecstatically as the cold trickles ran down his neck. Helen May glanced down at him with no softening of her eyes. Vic had lost nine goats out of the flock he had been set to herd, and he failed to manifest any great concern over the loss. On the contrary, he had told Helen May that he wished he could lose the whole bunch, and that he hoped coyotes had eaten them up, if they didn't have sense enough to stay with the rest. There had been a heated argument, and Helen May had not felt sure of coming out of it a victor. "No, I didn't, and you'd better get back to work or the rest will be gone, too," she called down to him petulantly. "It's bad enough to lose nine, without letting the rest go." "Aw, 's matter with yuh, anyway?" Vic retorted in a tone he thought would not reach her ears. "By gosh, you don't want a feller to cool off, even! By gosh, you'd make a feller _sleep_ with them darned goats if you could get away with it! Bu-lieve _me_, anybody can have my job that wants it. 'S hot enough to fry eggs in the shade, and she thinks, by hen, that I oughta stay out there--" "Yes, I do. And if you want anything to eat to-night, Vic Stevenson, you get right back there with those goats! They're going over the hill this minute. Hurry, Vic! For heaven's sake, are you trying to take a _bath_ in that can? Climb up that ridge and cut across and head them off! That old Billy's headed for town again--hurry!"