town, was a line of nondescript buildings along the railroad track, some miles away. The only moving thing within Kay's vision, that first morning of their arrival, was cattle thinly spread out over the empty country, and a lonely cowboy silhouetted on top of a butte. When she stood still the silence was unbroken; the time was to come when that silence was to beat on her ears like thunder, when she was to rattle her dishes, move her bits of furniture, to escape from it.
But at first there was healing in it. Tom, moving in and out, still watchful and anxious, was surprised to find her cheerful in the litter of mud, boxes and general confusion.
"Bearing up, are you, girl?"
"I like it," she told him. "It's so peaceful."
"So's a marble orchard."
"A marble orchard?"
"A cemetery."
It never occurred to her that, after all she had hoped of life, now she was asking for peace. . . .
If the ranch house, rather like Tom, had little resemblance to her earlier romantic dreams, at least it responded quickly to care and affection—and was rather like Tom in that, too.
To Kay, certain unforgettable pictures of those first weeks on the Reservation remained always. There was the fixing up of the ranch house, its development from dirt and squalor into a place of order and cleanliness and even comfort. The big room, with its floor painted and Indian rugs on it; the day by day touches; the evening when Tom came home to find the white dotted curtains at the windows; the day she labored all day at the rusty stove, and when on starting the fire they were both driven outside by the smell of burning paint; Tom putting up hooks in the kitchen, and then proudly arranging their pots and pans on them; the uses to which wooden boxes and packing cases could be put; the discovery that an old creeper lying in the grass could be lifted and trained up over the porch; the morning Tom called her out to see a cow grazing on a hillside close by, and proudly pointed out the L. D. brand on its side.
