chaparral, the dun tones of the open grass lands, and the brighter note of the valley meadows’ green were defined, blended and harmonized by the overlying haze with a delicacy exquisite beyond all human power to picture.  And in the nearer distances, chief of that army of mountain peaks, and master of the many miles that lie within their circle, Granite Mountain, gray and grim, reared its mighty bulk of cliff and crag as if in supreme defiance of the changing years or the hand of humankind.

In the heart of that beautiful land upon which, from the summit of the Divide, the stranger looked with such rapt appreciation, lies Williamson Valley, a natural meadow of lush, dark green, native grass.  And, had the man’s eyes been trained to such distances, he might have distinguished in the blue haze the red roofs of the buildings of the Cross-Triangle Ranch.

For some time the man stood there, a lonely figure against the sky, peculiarly out of place in his careful garb of the cities.  The schooled indifference of his face was broken.  His self-depreciation and mockery were forgotten.  His dark eyes glowed with the fire of excited anticipation—­with hope and determined purpose.  Then, with a quick movement, as though some ghost of the past had touched him on the shoulder, he looked back on the way he had come.  And the light in his eyes went out in the gloom of painful memories.  His countenance, unguarded because of his day of loneliness, grew dark with sadness and shame.  It was as though he looked beyond the town he had left that morning, with its litter and refuse of yesterday’s pleasure, to a life and a world of tawdry shams, wherein men give themselves to win by means fair or foul the tinsel baubles that are offered in the world’s petty games of chance.

And yet, even as he looked back, there was in the man’s face as much of longing as of regret.  He seemed as one who, realizing that he had reached a point in his life journey—­a divide, as it were—­from which he could see two ways, was resolved to turn from the path he longed to follow and to take the road that appealed to him the least.  As one enlisting to fight in a just and worthy cause might pause a moment, before taking the oath of service, to regret the ease and freedom he was about to surrender, so this man paused on the summit of the Divide.

Slowly, at last, in weariness of body and spirit, he stumbled a few feet aside from the road, and, sinking down upon a convenient rock, gave himself again to the contemplation of that scene which lay before him.  And there was that in his movement now that seemed to tell of one who, in the grip of some bitter and disappointing experience, was yet being forced by something deep in his being to reach out in the strength of his manhood to take that which he had been denied.

Again the man’s untrained eyes had failed to note that which would have first attracted the attention of one schooled in the land that lay about him.  He had not seen a tiny moving speck on the road over which he had passed.  A horseman was riding toward him.