The Man of the Desert

Fleeing an unwanted suitor, young socialite Hazel Radcliffe rides out into the Arizona desert, loses her way, and collapses from exhaustion until John Brownleigh, a poor mission worker, finds her and nurses her back to health. What grows between them stays unspoken: he believes his humble calling sets him beneath her world, while she feels unworthy of the seriousness of his faith and his labor in the desert. They part without confessing anything. Back East, Hazel resolves to remake herself into someone deserving of him, training as a nurse and learning the plain skills a frontier life would ask. First published in 1914, this is one of Hill’s Arizona romances and an early example of the American Christian fiction she helped define, where conversion and devotion carry as much weight as courtship.