sky, like drooping mantles, and darkened the sun.  Shefford built a little fire out of dead greasewood sticks, and with his blanket round his shoulders he hung over the blaze, scorching his clothes and hands.  He had been cold before in his life but he had never before appreciated fire.  This desert blast pierced him.  The squall enveloped him, thicker and colder and windier than the other, but, being better fortified, he did not suffer so much.  It howled away, hiding the mesa and leaving a white desert behind.  Shefford walked on, leading his horse, until the exercise and the sun had once more warmed him.

This last squall had rendered the Indian girl’s trail difficult to follow.  The snow did not quickly melt, and, besides, sheep tracks and the tracks of horses gave him trouble, until at last he was compelled to admit that he could not follow her any longer.  A faint path or trail led north, however, and, following that, he soon forgot the girl.  Every surmounted ridge held a surprise for him.  The desert seemed never to change in the vast whole that encompassed him, yet near him it was always changing.  From Red Lake he had seen a peaked, walled, and canyoned country, as rough as a stormy sea; but when he rode into that country the sharp and broken features held to the distance.

He was glad to get out of the sand.  Long narrow flats, gray with grass and dotted with patches of greasewood, and lined by low bare ridges of yellow rock, stretched away from him, leading toward the yellow peak that seemed never to be gained upon.

Shefford had pictures in his mind, pictures of stone walls and wild valleys and domed buttes, all of which had been painted in colorful and vivid words by his friend Venters.  He believed he would recognize the distinctive and remarkable landmarks Venters had portrayed, and he was certain that he had not yet come upon one of them.  This was his second lonely day of travel and he had grown more and more susceptible to the influence of horizon and the different prominent points.  He attributed a gradual change in his feelings to the loneliness and the increasing wildness.  Between Tuba and Flagstaff he had met Indians and an occasional prospector and teamster.  Here he was alone, and though he felt some strange gladness, he could not help but see the difference.

He rode on during the gray, lowering, chilly day, and toward evening the clouds broke in the west, and a setting sun shone through the rift, burnishing the desert to red and gold.  Shefford’s instinctive but deadened love of the beautiful in nature stirred into life, and the moment of its rebirth was a melancholy and sweet one.  Too late for the artist’s work, but not too late for his soul!

For a place to make camp he halted near a low area of rock that lay like an island in a sea of grass.  There was an abundance of dead greasewood for a camp-fire, and, after searching over the rock, he found little pools of melted snow in the depressions.  He took off the saddle and pack, watered his horse, and, hobbling him as well as his inexperience permitted, he turned him loose on the grass.