Jackson Gregory

“ There was every sign of hasty dressing; she must have drawn on the first garments falling to her hurrying hands. The boots were unquestionably many sizes too large; trousers and shirt were monstrously ill-fitting. And, even so, the amazing thing was that she was most undeniably pretty. And, burned as she was from the sun, she was not an Indian. Her hair was a sunkissed brown; her eyes, he fancied, were gray.
“I am sorry,” said Sheldon after a considerable silence, “that I frightened you just now.”
Her gaze did not waver, lost nothing of its steady, searching intentness. ”

“ Her voice, until now so quiet, suddenly rang out passionately. “You come from the world outside, from over there!” she threw out her arm widely toward the south. “You come over, the mountains from the world outside where all men are bad! Where they fight like beasts for what we have here, where they steal and kill and cheat and lie and snatch from one another like hungry coyotes and wolves! You come here to steal and kill. I know! Haven’t others come before you, bad men creeping in from the outside?”
A strange sort of shiver ran through Sheldon’s blood. ”

“ Man or woman? Surely there was some one, surely there could not be two mad people here! Then why did the one in there hold back, letting her dispute entrance to the stranger? Why was there not another face to show at a crack of the door or at a window?
Questions, questions, and questions! And no one to answer them but a mad girl who said that she was Paula, daughter of King Midas! No; not even Paula to answer. For suddenly she had jerked the door open, slipped inside, and Sheldon heard the sound as of a heavy bar dropping into wooden sockets. ”