blue-green fir-trees pushed higher upward. In this comforting isolation Ambrose's spirits soared at every turn of the rapidly revolving wheels.
At La Fonda in Santa Fe he sought directions for reaching his friend's house and learned at last, after demanding information of a number of persons who knew nothing whatever about it, that Jack lived at some distance from town. Ambrose engaged a taxi and started forth.
Jack's house, like most of the others they had passed on the road, was of red adobe, a sprawling one-storey structure before which waved the feathery green plumes of a tamarisk and against which leaned a Mexican wearing a pink and green poncho and, over his left ear, a rose carnation. Behind the house snow-capped mountains rose against the azure sky. A flock of white pigeons circled over the flat roof The bell was answered by a Mexican girl of some beauty whose smile gave Ambrose the impression that she was taciturn only because she spoke very little English. With dignity and that poise of carriage that only comes from the habitual balancing of heavy objects on the head, she led the way through a tiny entrance hall into a large room roofed with peeled pine-trunks crossed in a herring-bone pattern with branches which supported the hay
