roud and innocent and
wistful, as is the sleeping face of a little, little girl. There was that
look of a broken flower, that look of lovely death, that stops the heart
of a mother sometimes when she bends over a crib and sees damp curls in a
halo about a strange, familiar face.

Thatcher, looking at Sheila, had some of these thoughts. A teamster is
either philosopher or clown. One cannot move, day after day, all day for
a thousand days, under a changeless, changeful sky, inch by inch, across
the surface of a changeless, changeful earth and not come very near to
some of the locked doors of the temple where clowns sleep and wise men
meditate. And Thatcher was a father, one of the wise and reasonable
fathers of the West, whose seven-year-old sons are friends and helpmates
and toward whom six-year-old daughters are moved to little acts of
motherliness.

The sun blazed for a minute on Sheila's face. She opened her eyes, looked
vaguely from some immense distance at Thatcher, and then sat up.

"Oh, gracious!" said Sheila, woman and sprite and adventurer again.
"Where the dickens is my hat? Did it fall out?"

"No, ma'am," Thatcher smiled in a relieved fashion. "I put it under
the seat."

Sheila scrambled to a perch on one of the sacks and faced the surface of
half a world.

"Oh, Mr. Thatcher, isn't it too wonderful! How high are we? Is this the
other side? Oh, no, I can see Millings. Poor tiny, tiny Millings! It _is_
small, isn't it? How very small it is! What air!" She shut her eyes,
drawing in the perfumed tonic. The altitude had intoxicated her. Her
heart was beating fast, her blood tingling, her brain electrified. Every
sense seemed to be sharpened. She saw and smelt and heard with abnormal
vividness.

"The flowers are awfully bright up here, aren't they?" she said. "What's
that coral-colored bushy one?"

"Indian paint-brush."

"And that blue one? It _is_ blue! I don't believe I ever knew what
blueness meant before."

"Lupine. And over yonder's monkshead. That other's larkspur, that
poisons cattle in the spring. On the other side you'll see a whole lot
more--wild hollyhock and fireweed and columbine--well, say, I learned all
them names from a dude I drove over one summer."

"And such a sky!" said Sheila, lifting her head, "and such big pines!"
She lost herself for a minute in the azure immensity above. A vast mosque
of cloud, dome bubbles great and small, stood ahead of them, dwarfing
every human experience