There was a strange mingling of culture and roughness in his speech. The girl could not make him out; yet there had been a palpitating earnestness in his description that showed he had felt the dawn in his very soul.
"You are--a--poet, perhaps?" she asked, half shyly. "Or an artist?" she hazarded.
He laughed roughly and seemed embarrassed. "No, I'm just a--bum! A sort of roughneck out of a job."
She was silent, watching him against the starlight, a kind of embarrassment upon her after his last remark. "You--have been here long?" she asked, at last.
"Three years." He said it almost curtly and turned his head away, as if there were something in his face he would hide.
She knew there was something unhappy in his life. Unconsciously her tone took on a sympathetic sound. "And do you get homesick and want to go back, ever?" she asked.
His tone was fairly savage now. "No!"
The silence which followed became almost oppressive before the Boy finally turned and in his kindly tone began to question her about the happenings which had stranded her in the desert alone at night.
So she came to tell him briefly and frankly about herself, as he questioned--how she came to be in Arizona all alone.
"My father is a minister in a small town in New York State. When I finished college I had to do something, and I had an offer of this Ashland school through a friend of ours who had a brother out here. Father and mother would rather have kept me nearer home, of course, but everybody says the best opportunities are in the West, and this was a good opening, so they finally consented. They would send post-haste for me to come back if they knew what a mess I have made of things right at the start--getting out of the train in the desert."
"But you're not discouraged?" said her companion, half wonderingly. "Some nerve you have with you. I guess you'll manage to hit it off in Ashland. It's the limit as far as discipline is concerned, I understand, but I guess you'll put one over on them. I'll bank on you after to-night, sure thing!"
She turned a laughing face toward him. "Thank you!" she said. "But I don't see how you know all that. I'm sure I didn't do anything particularly nervy. There wasn't anything else to do but what I did, if I'd tried."
"Most girls would have fainted and screamed, and fainted again when they were rescued," stated the Boy, out of a vast experience.