At ten o’clock the air was sun-warmed and sweet.  Half an hour later the genial day was made over by the high wind trailing vapours into a chill bleak sky.  They had climbed to fresh altitudes; the timber through which they progressed indicated that a height of at least seven thousand feet above sea-level had been passed.  They passed through groves of the thin-barked tamaracks, came at the base of a rugged slope to scattering mountain pines, which reared into lusty perfection on bleak, wind-swept levels, where many of their companion growths were beginning to run out in dwarfed, twisted misery, and came to a rocky pass through the mountains where on all sides the red cedar, the juniper of the Sierra, throve hardily among bare boulders, crowning the lofty crests like a sparse, stiff, hirsute display upon the gigantic body of the world.  The dwarf pine lingered here, straggling along the slopes, beaten down by many a winter of wind and heavy snow.  But by noon they had made a slow, tedious way down a rocky ridge and were once more in the heart of the upper forest belt.  In an upland meadow, through whose narrow boundaries a thin, cold stream trickled, they nooned.  Long had Gloria hungered for the moment when she would see King swing down from the saddle; during the last half-hour she had begun to fear that his brutality knew no bounds and that he would spare neither the horses nor her but crowd on until nightfall.  When he did dismount by the creek she drew rein fifty feet from him.

King slipped Buck’s bridle, dropped the tie-rope, and let the animal forage along the fringes of the brook.  To Gloria, in a voice which struck her as being as chill as the grey, overcast sky, he said: 

“Better let your horse eat.  We’ve got to go pretty steady to get anywhere to-day.”

Gloria got down stiffly from her saddle.  In all the days of her life she had never been so unutterably weary.  Further, she was faint from hunger and her throat pained her; she went to the creek and threw herself down and put her face into the cool water, from which she rose with a long sigh.  She had seen how King did with his tie-rope; she did similarly, but was too tired to trouble with removing the bit from her horse’s mouth.  Still Blackie accepted his handicapped opportunity and joined Buck in tearing and ripping at the lush grass.  It was more inviting than the manzanita-bushes and occasional sunflower-leaves at which he had snatched during the day.

King made coffee and fried bacon; the horses had earned an hour of rest and fodder, and a man has the right to bacon and coffee even though hard miles lie before him.  While he pottered with his fire he looked more than once at the sky in the south-west.  With all of his heart he wished that he had turned back with Gloria this morning.  By now he could have set her feet in a trail which even a fool could travel back to the log house, and he could be again hastening upon his errand.  Gloria lay inert; she chewed slowly at a bit broken from a slab of hard chocolate and kept her eyes closed.  Her face was very white; two big tears of distress slipped out from the shut lids.  But King did not come close enough to see them.