Yes, she had called him Harley that day, and he had understood. Her heart was out in the desert. He took the terrible blow with a smile and a flash of his gold teeth, and never referred to his secret again. He thought of her now, as he waddled back to his neglected game in the Silver Dollar saloon. He wished that he might have been privileged to admittance into that little room off the kitchen where something told him she was lying; he wished that he might see her once again before they buried her--but that would be presuming. He wished he knew of some plan whereby that poor body might be spared the degradation of interment in the lonely, windswept, desert cemetery, side by side with Indians, Mexicans, Greek section hands and the rude forefathers of San Pasqual. What a profanation! That horrible cemetery, surrounded by a fence of barbed wire and superannuated railroad ties, to receive that beloved clay. He pictured her as he had seen her every day for ten years, and a rush of vain regret brought the big tears to his buttermilk eyes; the chords of memory twanged in his breast and he paused on the outskirts of San Pasqual with hands upraised, fists clenched in an agony of desperation. “I can't stand it” he muttered. “I can't. It'll be lonely. I've got to get out. I'll close my game after the funeral an' _vamose._” But to return to affairs at the Hat Ranch. While Harley P. Hennage sat in the Silver Dollar saloon that afternoon dealing faro automatically and pondering the problem of the precise purpose for which he had been created; and while Mrs. Pennycook went from house to house west of the tracks, expounding her personal view of the extraordinary situation at the Hat Ranch, a south-bound train pulled in and discharged a trained nurse, an undertaker, a rectangular redwood box and more floral pieces than San Pasqual had seen in a decade. After instituting some inquiries as to its location, the nurse and the undertaker proceeded to the Hat Ranch, followed by a wagon bearing the box and the flowers.