She was thinking of anything in the world but of a tragedy not yet
grown cold, so near her that for a little it had seemed to embrace her.
Now it was almost as though it had not occurred. The world was all
unchanged about her, the town somnolent. She had shuddered as Ignacio
played upon his bell; but the shudder was rather from the bell's
resonant eloquence than from any more vital cause. A man she had never
seen, whose name even she did not know, had been shot by another man
unknown to her; she had heard only the shots, she had seen nothing.
True, she had heard also a voice crying out, but she sensed that it had
been the voice of an onlooker. She felt ashamed that the episode did
not move her more.

As, earlier in the afternoon, she had been drawn from the heat of her
room at Struve's hotel by the shade to be found in the Mission garden,
so now did a long, wavering line of cottonwoods beckon to her. In
files which turned eastward or westward here and there only to come
back to the general northerly trend, they indicated where an arroyo
writhed down, tortured serpent-wise, from the mountains. Through their
foliage she had glimpsed the Engle home. She expected to find running
water under their shade, that and an attendant coolness.

But the arroyo proved to be dry and hot, a gash in the dry bosom of the
earth, its bottom strewn with smooth pebbles and sand and a very
sparse, unattractive vegetation, stunted and harsh. And it was almost
as hot here as on San Juan's street; into the shade crept the
heat-waves of the dry, scorched air.

Led by the line of cottonwoods she found a little path and followed it,
experiencing a vague relief to have the town at her back. She knew
that distances deceived the eye in this bleak land, and yet she thought