Page:J Allan Dunn--The Girl of Ghost Mountain.djvu/113

Rh York. And we sold most of it for enough to bring US here and leave a little over. So we packed what was left, shipped it—and came."

Sheridan let out a deep breath. The girl seemed unconscious of her own Odyssey. Fighting stock indeed.

"You like it?" he asked.

"I love it. It is grander than our New England hills that we called mountings." Sheridan repressed a smile as he caught the twist of her tongue. "It is vast, too big to touch, I sometimes think, and then it is suddenly all intimate, broody."

"You are not lonely?"

She looked at him squarely.

"Sometimes. And you? You are from the East."

"I haven't been. I have been working too hard. I might be lonely, now." They both sat quietly for a moment or two.

"Fruit trees will grow here, won't they?" she asked presently. "I should like to have some. We had an old orchard at Hannal—Hannibal."

She had a faculty of conjuring up pictures, this slimsy, plucky lady. Sheridan glimpsed her sitting under flowering apple trees, Thora coming up through the long grass with a foaming bucket of milk, her father dreaming in a long chair.

"Almost everything grows here," he said. "Altitude makes the division lines. Oranges, lemons, limes, figs, dates, olives, even almonds in places. Peaches, pears, apples and apricots about Yuma. Grapes, strawberries—and alfalfa."

"Why the stress on alfalfa?" she asked, laughingly.