One picture stood out clearer than the rest, ineffaceable, to be carried
to his grave--the day he came back and heard that Juana was dead. He had
left them at a place in Inyo, a scattering of houses on the edge of the
desert. Pancha saw him coming, and her figure, racing to meet him in a
blown flutter of cotton skirt, was as plain before his eyes as if she
were running toward him now along the shining water path. She was twelve,
brown as a nut, and scarecrow-thin, with a tangle of black hair, and
narrow, dark eyes. He could recall the feel of her little hard hand
inside his as she told him, excited at imparting such news, pushing the
hair off her dirty face to see how he took it.

It had crushed the heart in him and some upholding principle of hope and
resolution broke. He found a place for Pancha with Maria Lopez, the
Mexican woman who ran the Buon Gusto restaurant at Bakersfield and
agreed to look after the girl for pay. Then he went back to the open,
not caring much, the springs of his soul gone dry. He had no energy for
the old life and did other things, anything to make his own food and
Pancha's keep--herded sheep, helped on the cattle ranges, tended store,
hung on the fringes of the wilderness, saw men turn to savages and
turned himself.

At long intervals he went down to the settlements and saw Pancha, growing
into a gawky girl, headstrong, and with the wildness of her mother's
people cropping out. She hated Maria Lopez and the work in the restaurant
and wanted him to take her to the mountains. When she was sixteen a spell
of illness laid him up and after that he had difficulty in getting work.
Two months passed without a payment and when he finally got down to
Bakersfield he found that Pancha had gone, run away with a traveling
company of actors. Maria Lopez and he had a fight, raged at one another
in mutual fury, and then he started out to find his girl, not knowing