as though the air were a melted sapphire.  There was still blessedness such as Sheila had never felt.  She was filled with a longing to ride on and on until her spirit should pass into the wide, tranquil, glowing spirit of the lonely land.  It seemed to her that some forgotten medicine man sat cross-legged in a hollow of the hills, blowing, from a great peace pipe, the blue smoke of peace down and along the hollows and the canons and the level lengths of range.  In the mighty breast of the blower there was not even a memory of trouble, only a noble savage serenity too deep for prayer.

She rode for a long while—­no sound but her pony’s hoofs—­her eyes lifted across the valley until a sudden fragrance drew her attention earthwards.  She was going through an open glade of aspens and the ground was white with columbine, enormous flowers snowy and crisp as though freshly starched by fairy laundresses.  With a cry of delight Sheila jumped off her horse, tied him by his reins to a tree, and began gathering flowers with all the eager concentration of a six-year-old.  And, like all the flower-gatherers of fable from Proserpina down, she found herself the victim of disaster.  When she came back to the road with a useless, already perishing mass of white, the pony had disappeared.  Her knot had been unfaithful.  Quietly that mild-nosed, pensive-eyed, round-bodied animal had pulled himself free and tiptoed back to join his friends.

Sheila hurried up the road toward the summit she had so recently crossed, till the altitude forced her to stop with no breath in her body and a pounding redness before her eyes.  She stamped her feet with vexation.  She longed to cry.  She remembered confusedly, but with a certain satisfaction, some of the things Thatcher had said to his team.  An entire and sudden lenience toward the gentle art of swearing was born in her.  She threw her columbine angrily away.  She had come so far on her journey that she could never be able to get back to Thatcher nor even to Duff’s shanty before dark.  And how far down still the valley lay with that shadow widening and lengthening across it!

Her sudden loneliness descended upon her with an almost audible rush.  Dusk at this height—­dusk with a keen smell of glaciers and wind-stung pines—­dusk with the world nine thousand feet below; and about her this falling-away of mountain-side, where the trees seemed to slant and the very flowers to be outrun by a mysterious sort of flight of rebel earth toward space!  The great and heady height was informed with a presence which if not hostile was terrifyingly ignorant of man.  There was some one not far away, she felt, just above there behind the rocky ridge, just back there in the confusion of purplish darkness streaked by pine-tree columns, just below in the thicket of the stream—­some one to meet whose look meant death.