The weird music changed to whistled notes as liquid as a flute.

The sound drew closer.

A horseman rode out on the shoulder and checked his mount.

One could not choose him at first glance as a type of those who fight nature in a region where the thermometer moves through a scale of a hundred and sixty degrees in the year to an accompaniment of cold-stabbing winds and sweltering suns.

A thin, handsome face with large brown eyes and black hair, a body tall but rather slenderly made--he might have been a descendant of some ancient family of Norman nobility; but could such proud gentry be found riding the desert in a tall-crowned sombrero with chaps on his legs and a red bandana handkerchief knotted around his throat?
That first glance made the rider seem strangely out of place in such surroundings.