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قراءة كتاب Dust of the Desert

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‏اللغة: English
Dust of the Desert

Dust of the Desert

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دار النشر: Project Gutenberg
الصفحة رقم: 8

title="[40]"/> the glass—“man, always lay your bets on a red-headed girl!”

That minute of communion with a smiling confidant was an important one in the life of Grant Hickman, cautious bachelor. For it came to him with the force of a hammer blow that he wanted and must have this vivid creature of the desert named Benicia O’Donoju. Girl of fire and sparkle—of a spirit free and piquant as the winds that blow across the wastes—unspoiled of cities and the stale conventions of drawing rooms. Oh, he would have her! Gone she might be, out into a land beyond his ken. Unguessed barriers of circumstance, of others’ intervention, might have to be scaled; but somehow, somewhere, Grant Hickman was going to find and win Benicia O’Donoju.

Love at first sight—old-fashioned, mid-Victorian stuff, says the cynical débutante over her cigarette and outlaw cocktail. In New York tearooms and Washington ballrooms, quite so. Where girls of twenty must know the sum that stands in bank to Clarence’s credit, before Clarence is marked down as eligible, love at first sight is, in truth, dead as the dodo bird. Even so, spirit still calls to spirit and like leaps to like most all the world over. It is only where fungus spots stain the garden that love will not bloom.

When Grant quit the Pullman Colonel Urgo was nowhere to be seen. Grant idly wondered as he walked to the hotel, directly across a plaza from the station, how long it would be before he encountered this half-portion rival of his and what would be the Spaniard’s first move in his frank threat of reprisals of the night before. But when he was shown to his room—and the New York man whimsically reflected he had seen better ones at the Admiral on Madison Avenue—events of recent hours were pushed back from his attention by the more immediate demands of his presence in Arizora. He took from his suitcase the letter that had brought him sky-hooting across the continent to this back-water of life on the Mexican Line and skimmed it through:

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