By this time Brainard and the pony had come sufficiently near together so that he could make out the small straight figure. The girl could not be over fourteen, he judged; she was thin and slight, with dark skin and small features concealed beneath the flap of an old felt hat. She wore a faded khaki skirt and leather leggings. In her small bony hand dangled a heavy man’s quirt with which she swished the ground, and at times she looked up shyly at the “stranger.”
“Where you from?” she inquired.
“New York,” Brainard replied.
“New York!” she repeated with an accent of wonder and surprise. “That must be a mighty big ta-own.”
“Rather more populous than this—what do you call it?”
“They call the siding back there by the tank Phantom.”
“Phantom—is that because it’s only a mirage?”
“I can’t say. … Where be you going?”
“Mexico!” Brainard hazarded at a venture.
“Mexico!” the girl drawled. “That must be a sight farther off than Phoenix.”
“I guess it is.”
“What are you going to Mexico for, stranger?” the girl persisted.
“Mining business,” Brainard fabricated glibly.
“Copper or gold?”
“All kinds, my child,” Brainard replied flippantly.
The girl drew herself up with considerable dignity, and remarking—“I’m agoin’ to see what they all be doin’ down yonder,” stirred up the yellow pony and rode off in the direction of the arroyo. She drew up a few rods from the center of activity and stood there in the twilight. Brainard was sorry for his foolish answer that had apparently frightened her away. He went back to his compartment, and after a few moments’ thought grasped his valise and got off the car.
“If she can live in this country, I guess I can,” he muttered to himself.
He flung his bag down in the sagebrush and sat on it, waiting until the girl came back. Presently there was a series of jubilant toots from the engine of the first train as a signal of the successful reopening of traffic; then the east-bound trains began slowly to move one by one down into the gully over the temporary track. When the last train had crept by him Brainard rose and sauntered in the direction of the girl. She was still sitting motionless on her pony, absorbed in the spectacle of all these moving trains—a peculiarly lonely little figure, there in the gathering dusk of the desert, watching as it were the procession of civilization pass by her. … After the eastbound trains had got away and were steaming off towards the horizon, the west-bound trains began to file across the break, having picked up the wrecking crew and their equipment. The girl did not move. Evidently in her life this was a rare treat, and she did not mean to lose any part of it. So Brainard waited until the red rear lamps of the last train shone out by the water tank, and then as the girl slowly turned her pony back he rose from the ground and hailed her. “Hello!”
The pony shied at Brainard, but the girl easily reined it in. She did not seem much discomposed by the sight of him.
“Lost your train, stranger?” she observed with admirable equanimity. “There won’t be no more along ’fore to-morrow morning, I reckon,” she added.
“I don’t believe I want a train,” he replied.
“Goin’ to Mexico on foot with that trunk?” she asked. He detected a mirthful note in her voice. Evidently she took neither him nor his pretended mining business with great seriousness.
“That’s just what I’m going to try to do!”
“Well, you won’t get there to-night, I reckon.”
“I suppose not. Can you tell me some place where I could spend the night?”
“There’s the water tank,” she suggested, with a little laugh.
“Isn’t there somebody where you come from?”
The girl shook her head quite positively.
“There must be some one in this God-forsaken country who would take a stranger in! I don’t care about spending the night out here.”
The girl laughed as if it were all a great joke. “There won’t be nobody to hurt you, stranger.”
“Thanks!”
She started on her road. Brainard thought he was in for a night in the open and cursed his folly in jumping off into the desert. But the girl pulled up after a few steps, and he could hear her gay chuckle as she called out:
“You sure did want to stay in Arizona bad—you lost six trains!”
“I meant to!”
“That mining business must be very important.”
“Something else is,” he said boldly.
“Was it very bad, what made you want to get to Mexico—a killing?”
“Not as bad as that.”
“What was it?”
“You wouldn’t understand, I am afraid.”
“You might try tellin’ of me, all the same.”
“It isn’t anything bad.”
“They all say that,” she suggested mockingly.
“I’m merely trying to carry out some one’s orders.”
The girl looked mystified, and after a moment’s further thought remarked:
“There’s old man Gunnison. He might take you in for the night.”
“Where does he live?”
“Back a ways up the trail.”
“Won’t you show me the way?”
“I might,” she admitted. “Better give me that trunk,” she said, pointing to the bag. “You would sure be tired if you toted that all the way to Gunnison’s.”
The girl slipped from the pony and expertly made the bag fast to the saddle with the thongs. Then taking the reins, which she drew over the animal’s head, she strode out into the darkness. Brainard stumbled on after his guide as best he could. Presently when he became more accustomed to the dark and to progress over the uneven ground he joined the girl and tried to make her talk. She developed shyness, however, and replied only briefly to his questions. She lived somewhere up in the mountains towards which they were traveling and which could be dimly perceived ahead, a soft, dark barrier rising in the night. But what she did there, who her people were, she would not say. In spite of her youth and her inexperience she had a shrewd child’s wit that could turn off inconvenient curiosity. Although she drawled and spoke the slovenly language of uneducated people, there was something about her, perhaps her instinctive reserve, that bespoke a better breeding than her clothes and her speech indicated. She did not make further inquiries about Brainard’s business; he surmised that she refrained because she thought him to be some kind of a wrongdoer. He wanted to explain to her his erratic conduct, but he realized that it would be not only foolish but almost impossible to make clear to her limited mind just what the situation with him was. So for minutes there was silence between them while they plodded on.
Brainard liked the girl, felt a strange sort of pity for her, an unreasoned pity for a forlorn and lonely child, who he instinctively divined was sensitive and perhaps unhappy in spite of her flippant speech.
“What were you doing down there at the railroad?” he asked in another attempt to start conversation.
“Oh,” she