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Updated: June 2, 2025
They had the feeling that they were helping to set a mouse-trap to catch a lion or something like that. And after the wedding Mr. and Mrs. Harboro emerged from the church into the clear night, under the stars, and went afoot in the direction of their new home an attractive structure which Harboro had had erected on what was called the Quemado Road.
It was to be an affair of some twenty-four hours' duration, counting the dancing and feasting, and it was to take place in a sort of stockade which served the Quemado settlement in lieu of a town hall or a public building of any kind. Invitations had been practically unlimited in number. There was to be accommodation for hundreds.
The other discovery was made by Harboro, and it was to the effect that Sylvia had at last blossomed out as a perfectly ideal wife. A certain listlessness had fallen from her like a shadow. Late in the winter it was about the time of the ride to the Quemado, Harboro thought it must have been a change had come over her. There was a glad tranquillity about her now which was as a tonic to him.
It was no part of their plan that he should be heard singing in Sylvia's room by casual passers-by on the Quemado Road. He touched the keys lightly and when he sang his voice seemed scarcely to carry across the room. There was a rapid passage on the keyboard, like the patter of a pony's hoofs in the distance, and then the words came: "From the desert I come to thee On my Arab shod with fire...."
To-morrow he would know what to do. But the sight of the room assigned to him surprised him in some odd way as if every article of furniture in it were mocking him. It was not a room really to be used, he thought. At least, it was not a room for him to use. He did not belong in that bed; he had a bed of his own, in the house he had built on the Quemado Road.
The vast stricken spaces were but a material manifestation of those cruelties of nature which had broken her long ago, and which could not be expected to withdraw their spell now that the time had come for her destruction. She looked far before her and saw where the Quemado Road attained its highest point and disappeared on the other side of a ridge. A house stood there, lonely and serene.
By a signal previously concerted of notching the trees, he was able to identify the spots visited by Pizarro, Puerto de Pinas, Puerto de la Hambre, Pueblo Quemado touching successively at every point of the coast explored by his countrymen, though in a much shorter time.
And again she sighed. She had seen Runyon often since the afternoon on which he had made his first appearance on the Quemado Road. Seemingly, his duties took him out that way often; and he never passed without glancing toward Sylvia's window and looking back again after he had passed. Nor had he often found that place by the window vacant.
And so Harboro decided that he and Sylvia would go to the big affair at the Quemado. There was an atmosphere of happiness and bustle in the house when the night of the outing came. He would have preferred a carriage, but Sylvia had assumed that they would ride, and she plainly preferred that mode of travel. She had been an excellent horsewoman in the old San Antonio days.
The boudoir was at the front of the house, up-stairs, overlooking the Quemado Road. It made Sylvia's eyes glisten. It contained a piano, and a rather tiny divan in russet leather, and maple-wood furniture, and electric fixtures which made you think of little mediæval lanterns.
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