evidently heard much about them, for he did not seem to misunderstand the situation as many Latins would have done. Before the girl had realized it the two hours were over and the little engine reappeared.

Conejo should, I believe, be called a town. The people who live in it always dignify it by that name and they probably have a reason for so doing. To one holding advanced ideas as to towns, it seems at a first glance to be only a collection of pinkish looking adobes which on inspection turn out to be a church, a store, a jail, a saloon, a hotel—at which no one stays who has a friend to take him in—and some private houses. It is Juarez without the bull ring, the racetrack or the gambling places.

It is situated rather flatly between two ranges of mountains and when Polly Street landed there at about six o’clock—a trying hour in itself—it was in the grip of a sand-storm. One’s first sand-storm is always a surprise. It looks so innocent from behind a window pane; just sand—blowing about rather swiftly, whirling in spirals, beating against the glass, piling itself up in drifts—an interesting sight but not a terrifying one.

Polly had been a little surprised to see the fat ladies 39 array themselves in goggles before descending from the train, and had laughingly refused an offer of his own from Juan Pachuca, who promptly put them on himself. But when she alighted from the train onto the platform which extended from the rear end of the general merchandise store, and which served as station, waiting parlor and baggage-room, she gasped in dismay. It was as though thousands of tiny pieces of glass had struck her in the face and throat.

39

Before she could get her breath they struck her again and again; sharp, vindictive, piercing little particles they were. She shut her eyes and put her hands to her bare throat to protect it. Suddenly she felt a hand on her arm and Juan Pachuca’s voice said:

“Keep them shut and let me lead you. I told you what sand-storms were—you’d better have taken the goggles.”

Polly succumbed and felt herself being led along the platform.

“There, we’re in the store,” said the young man. “Rather nasty, eh?”

“Awful! I never felt anything like it,” gasped the girl, shaking the sand from her clothes. “And it isn’t sand, it’s gravel. No wonder you wear goggles!”

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