of height. "Mr. Thatcher, there isn't any air up
here. What is it we're trying to breathe, anyway?"

He smiled patiently, sympathetically, and handed her a tin mug of icy
water from the little trickling spring. The bruise of Hudson's kiss ached
at the cold touch of the water and a shadow fell over her excitement. She
thanked the driver gravely.

"What time is it now?" she asked.

"Past noon. Better eat your sandwich."

She took one from its wrapping pensively, but ate it with absent-minded
eagerness. Thatcher's blue eyes twinkled.

"Seems like I recollect a lady that didn't want no food to be put
in for her."

"I remember her, too," said Sheila, between bites, "but very, very
vaguely."

She stood up after a third sandwich, shook crumbs from her skirt, and
stretched her arms. "What a great sleep I've had! Since six o'clock!"
She stared down at the lower world. "I've left somebody at Millings."

"Who's that?" asked Thatcher, drawling the words a trifle as a Westerner
does when he is conscious of a double meaning.

"Me."

Thatcher laughed. "You're a real funny girl, Miss Arundel," he said.

"Yes, I left one Me when I decided to go into the saloon, and now I've
left another Me. I believe people shed their skins like snakes."

"Yes'm, I've had that notion myself. But as you get older, your skin kind
of peels off easy and gradual--you don't get them shocks when you sort of
come out all new and shiny and admirin' of yourself."

Sheila blushed faintly and looked at him. His face was serene and empty
of intention. But she felt that she had been guilty of egotism, as indeed
she had. She asked rather meekly for her hat, and having put it on like a
shadow above her fairness, she climbed up to Thatcher's side on the
driver's seat. The hat was her felt Stetson, and, for the rest, she was
clad in her riding-clothes, the boy's shirt, the short corduroy skirt,
the high-laced boots. Her youthfulness, rather than her strange beauty,
was accentuated by this dress. She had the look of a super-delicate boy,
a sort of rose-leaf fairy prince.

"Are we on the road?" asked Sheila presently.

Thatcher gave way to mirth. "Don't it seem like a road to you?"

She lurched against him, then saved herself from falling out at the other
side by a frantic clutch.

"Is it a road?" She looked down a dizzy slope of which the horse's
foothold seemed to her the most precarious part.

"Yes'm--all the road there is. We call it that. We're k