freight train, his run being from Moonstone to Denver. Ray was a big
fellow, with a square, open American face, a rock chin, and features
that one would never happen to remember. He was an aggressive idealist,
a freethinker, and, like most railroad men, deeply sentimental. Thea
liked him for reasons that had to do with the adventurous life he had
led in Mexico and the Southwest, rather than for anything very personal.
She liked him, too, because he was the only one of her friends who ever
took her to the sand hills. The sand hills were a constant
tantalization; she loved them better than anything near Moonstone, and
yet she could so seldom get to them. The first dunes were accessible
enough; they were only a few miles beyond the Kohlers’, and she could
run out there any day when she could do her practicing in the morning
and get Thor off her hands for an afternoon. But the real hills—the
Turquoise Hills, the Mexicans called them—were ten good miles away, and
one reached them by a heavy, sandy road. Dr. Archie sometimes took Thea
on his long drives, but as nobody lived in the sand hills, he never had
calls to make in that direction. Ray Kennedy was her only hope of
getting there.
This summer Thea had not been to the hills once, though Ray had planned
several Sunday expeditions. Once Thor was sick, and once the organist in
her father’s church was away and Thea had to play the organ for the
three Sunday services. But on the first Sunday in September, Ray drove
up to the Kronborgs’ front gate at nine o’clock in the morning and the
party actually set off. Gunner and Axel went with Thea, and Ray had
asked Spanish Johnny to come and to bring Mrs. Tellamantez and his
mandolin. Ray was artlessly fond of music, especially of Mexican music.
He and Mrs. Tellamantez had got up the lunch between them, and they were
to make coffee in the desert.
When they left Mexican Town, Thea was on the front seat with Ray and
Johnny, and Gunner and Axel sat behind with Mrs. Tellamantez. They
objected to this, of course, but there were some things about which Thea
would have her own way. “As stubborn as a Finn,” Mrs. Kronborg sometimes
said of her, quoting an old Swedish saying. When they passed the
Kohlers’, old Fritz and Wunsch were cutting grapes at the arbor. Thea
gave them a businesslike nod. Wunsch came to the gate and looked after
them. He divined Ray Kennedy’s hopes, and he distrusted every expedition
that led away from the piano. Unconsciously he made Thea pay for
frivolousness of this sort.
As Ray Kennedy’s party followed the faint road across the sagebrush,
they heard behind them the sound of church bells, which gave them a
sense of escape and boundless freedom. Every rabbit that shot across the
path, every sage hen that flew up by the trail, was like a runaway
thought, a message that one sent into the desert. As they went farther,
the illusion of the mirage became more instead of less convincing; a
shallow silver lake that spread for many miles, a little misty in the
sunlight. Here and there one saw reflected the image of a heifer, turned
loose to live upon the sparse sand-grass. They were magnified to a
preposterous height and looked like mammoths, prehistoric beasts
standing solitary in the waters that for many thousands of years
actually washed over that desert;—the mirage itself may be the ghost
