When Nora came in to help her dress she asked her if she liked it.
"Like it?" said Nora. "It's the worst I've ever seen, Miss Kay. Not a tree! Nothing!"
She wandered out to breakfast. Her mother was already there, and Herbert, and old William was pulling out her chair. William, who had been with her grandfather since the Mariposa had come, shiny and new, out of the railroad shops, and who had served the great men of his time when they had accompanied old Lucius west, for bear and deer hunting in the daytime and poker games at night.
"Morning, everybody," said Kay. "Well, William, we're almost there!"
"Yes, miss," said William, grinning. "I shorely am glad to get back. Grape fruit or melon, miss?"
"Grape fruit, please. Have you looked outside, you two? It's rather wonderful."
"It looks frightfully dusty," said her mother. "I've told Nora to pin some more sheets over your clothes, Kay."
"Don't you see anything but dust, Herbert?"
Herbert saw that something more was expected of him. Personally he regarded it as the land that God forgot, but now he stared out of a window.
"I suppose," he said vaguely, "that if one cared for that sort of thing"
She ate her grapefruit rather sulkily. How odd they were! Her mother must know that old story, but there she sat delicately sipping her coffee and attempting to read the head lines of a paper from the Junction as it lay by her father's plate. No one ever opened the paper until her father had read it. When Henry came in she made, however, one more attempt.
"Father?"
"Yes," absently.
"Isn't this the desert they had to cross with the cattle, before they got to" She hesitated. It seemed sacrilege to offer them the valley. "—to the end of the trip?"
"What cattle?"
"Grandfather's."
