As they came to the opening of the canon, the high mountain-top
disappeared; the immediate foothills closed down and shut it out. The air
grew headily light. Even under the blazing July sun, it came cool to the
lungs, cool and intensely sweet. Thousands of wild flowers perfumed it
and the sun-drawn resin of a thousand firs. All the while the rushing of
water accompanied the creaking of Thatcher's progress. Not far from the
road, down there below in a tangle of pine branches, willows, and ferns,
the frost-white stream fled toward the valley with all the seeming terror
of escape. Here the team began their tugging and their panting and their
long pauses to get breath. Thatcher would push forward the wooden handle
that moved his brake, and at the sound and the grating of the wheel the
horses would stop automatically and stand with heaving sides. The wagon
shook slightly with their breathing. At such times the stream seemed to
shout in the stillness. Below, there began to be an extraordinary view of
the golden country with its orange mesas and its dark, purple rim of
mountains. Millings was a tiny circle of square pebbles, something built
up by children in their play. The awful impersonalities of sky and earth
swept away its small human importance. Thatcher's larkspur-colored eyes
absorbed serenity. They had drawn their color and their far-sighted
clearness from such long contemplations of distant horizon lines.

Now and again, however, Thatcher would glance back and down from his high
seat at his load. It consisted, for the most part, of boxes of canned
goods, but near the front there was a sort of nest, made from bags of
Indian meal. In the middle of the nest lay another bundle of slim,
irregular outline. It was covered with a thin blanket and a piece of
sacking protected it from the sun. A large, clumsy parcel lay beside it.
Each time Thatcher looked at this portion of his load he pulled more
anxiously at his mustache. At last, when the noon sun stood straight
above the pass and he stopped to water his horses at a trough which
caught a trickle of spring water, he bent down and softly raised the
piece of sacking, suspended like a tent from one fat sack to another
above the object of his uneasiness. There, in the complete relaxation of
exhausted sleep, lay Sheila, no child more limp and innocent of aspect;
her hair damp and ringed on her smooth forehead, her lips mournful and
sweet, sedately closed, her expression at once p