Goddess of the Night

PORTRAIT OF A DELICATE, DESERT QUEEN WHOSE LOVELINESS IS DISPLAYED WHEN MOONLIGHT AND STARDUST COME AT NIGHT

PHOTOGRAPHIC STUDIES BY FLOYD GETSINGER

THE BIGGEST FIFTY CENT bargain that ever came my way happened before I knew a thing about the desert except that I was living out there, practically alone, hundreds of miles from home, praying the Sun to make my baby well. In a spot like that a woman thinks things that never can be said and she learns a lot. Sometimes in strange ways. It was during that last war the one we thought terrible at the time but which seems almost a nice war now, in the world's present insanity. I was chopping slivers off a mesquite stump, feeling sorry for myself, wondering if life was just a dead stick hacked to pieces by circumstances. Even the soft January sunshine couldn't make my town-hungry eyes see any possibility of beauty in the miles of silent desert around my shack. Right then it happened. A fat old Indian in a rickety wagon pulled his mule to a stop beside me. And just sat there, looking straight ahead. Wily psychologist; of course I asked the expected question, but even then he only pointed over his shoulder toward some sacks in the wagonbed. There I uncovered a forty pound, dirt-encrusted bulb, shaped like a harried turnip. "What is it?" I begged. "Fifty cents," announced the salesman. "But what is it?"

"Fifty cents." Repeat. Repeat many times, and you have our entire conversation. There was nothing for me to do but buy the mystery unsolved which after all is when a mystery is at its best. I left it lying in the shade of the shack and wondered for days what I was harboring. It looked businesslike, sort of gray brown under the dirt, with a few segmented, fluted sticks sprangling out of the fat end. It was not pretty but it commanded my respect. It seemed so full of power and had evidently achieved so much in spite of its stern desert home. At last one day I appealed to Tony when his old Ford rattled up with milk and supplies. He was the