Perhaps these good people did not mean to be unkind; certainly the crimson stains that colored the girls cheeks when she passed them should have won their charity and their silence.
There was nothing in Westwood for her; and so she was glad to get away. And the trip westward toward Dawes opened a new vista of life to her. She was leaving the old and the tragic and adventuring into the new and promising, where she could face life without the onus of a shame that had not been hers.
Before she was half way to Dawes she had forgotten Westwood and its wagging tongues. She alone, of all the passengers in the Pullman, had not been aware of the heat and the discomfort. She had loved every foot of the great prairie land that, green and beautiful, had flashed past the car window; she had gazed with eager, interested eyes into the far reaches of the desert through which she had passed, filling her soul with the mystic beauty of this new world, reveling in its vastness and in the atmosphere of calm that seemed to engulf it.
Dawes had not disappointed her; on the contrary, she loved it at first sight. For though Dawes was new and crude, it looked rugged and honestand rather too busy to hesitate for the purpose of indulging in gossipidle or otherwise. Dawes, she was certain, was occupying itself with progressa thing that, long since, Westwood had forgotten.
Five minutes after she had entered the buckboard, the spirit of this new world had seized upon the girl and she was athrob and atingle with the joy of it. It filled her veins; it made her cheeks flame and her eyes dance. And the strange aromathe pungent breath of the sage, borne to her on the slight breezeshe drew into her lungs with great long breaths that seemed to intoxicate her.
Oh, she exclaimed delightedly, isnt it great! Oh, I love it!
Elam Parsons grinned at herthe habitual smirk with which he recognized all emotion not his own.
It _does_ look like a good field for business, he conceded.
The girl looked at him quickly, divined the sordidness of his thoughts, and puckered her brows in a frown. And thereafter she enjoyed the esthetic beauties of her world without seeking confirmation from her uncle.
Her delight grew as the journey to the new home progressed. She saw the fertile farming country stretching far in the big section of country beyond the water-filled basin; her eyes glowed as the irrigation ditches, with their locks and gates, came under her observation; and she sat silent, awed by the mightiness of it allthe tall, majestic mountains looming somberly many miles distant behind a glowing mistlike a rose veil or a gauze curtain lowered to partly conceal the mystic beauty of them.