April has turned into May and spring is giving way to summer. Today is another big blue. Outside the air is hot and dry. Through the swagged curtains the sun winks and beckons. Inside the air-conditioning is on full blast. I pull my fleece around me and gnaw away at the biscuit, my mind drifting to Temerosa. I hear the familiar echo of the hammer, the distant whine of the drill. The first phase of work on the town is nearing completion: the boarding house and even some of the smaller cabins awaiting only their doors to be finished. I picture Duval planing them flat on the worktable, his shirtsleeves rolled up. Now when I walk down to the town each morning, I watch for the smile in his eyes.

I’ve found there is another Arizona to be seen apart from the border. Duval takes me riding through hills covered in morning glory, up narrow mountain passes where long thin Douglas firs look like forests of unopened umbrellas. He weaves his pickup round serpentine roads, climbing to a vertiginous 9,000 feet in the Santa Catalina Mountains from where the world looks like it’s been created by some God playing whimsical balancing games with stalagmites and boulders. In the high desert, he lowers me down into the narrow confines of slot canyons whose towering stone walls are indented with the fossils of strange prehistoric sea monsters. And here is the West I have dreamed of exploring, one of such bewildering scenery changes and harsh beauty that sometimes I feel that to surrender to it completely, to one day curl up and die here, might not be such a bad thing after all.

‘Go on, take another one.’ Helen is again bearing down upon us with the plate of biscuits. ‘They’re fresh out of the box, arrived FedEx only yesterday from the Gourmet Bake Company. They do bread, pies, glazed hams, even meatloaf, all home-made.’ She whips a catalogue off the table. ‘Jeff’s an investor; he always saw a big future in mail-order food and he was right!’

‘He sure is a fine man,’ the wives echo dutifully.

‘Hell, yes he is,’ Helen says gaily. ‘Sometimes you have to kiss every frog in the world to find your prince!’ And I have to bite down on my lip not to laugh.

‘Say! Talk of the devil!’ Helen brushes the clinging crumbs off her velour tracksuit and springs nimbly to her feet as Jeff, rival tour completed, enters the room flanked by his investors. Neither are local. Lane, a stocky man from Albuquerque, seems terminally ill at ease with himself and had earlier mumbled an introduction from the corner of his mouth. The second man, Selby, is all bone and sinew and nerves. He stares at me curiously as Hogan advances towards us mid-anecdote.