asn't bein'
prayed at. He sure licked me, that dern son of a--Oh, by God, lady,
you'll just hev to excuse me, please." He wiped his forehead. "I reckon I
better keep still."

Sheila struggled, then gave way to mirth. Her companion, after a doubtful
look, relaxed into his wide, bearded smile. After that matters were on an
easy footing between them and the "excuse me, lady," was, for the most
part, left to her understanding.

They drifted like a lurching vessel through the long crystal day. Never
before this journey into Hidden Creek had time meant anything to Sheila
but a series of incidents, occupations, or emotions; now first she
understood the Greek impersonation of the dancing hours. She had watched
the varying faces the day turns to those who fold their hands and still
their minds to watch its progress. She had seen the gradual heightening
of brilliance from dawn to noon, and then the fading-out from that high,
white-hot glare, through gold and rose and salmon and purple, to the ashy
lavenders of twilight and so into gray and the metallic, glittering
coldness of the mountain night. It was the purple hour when she said
good-bye to Saint Mark on the far side of a swift and perilous ford. She
was left standing in the shadow of a near-by mountain-side while he rode
away into the still golden expanse of valley beyond the leafy course of
the stream. Hidden Creek had narrowed and deepened. It ran past Sheila
now with a loud clapping and knocking at its cobbled bed and with an
over-current of noisy murmurs. The hurrying water was purple, with flecks
of lavender and gold. The trees on its banks were topped with emerald
fire where they caught the light of the sun. The trail to Miss Blake's
ranch ran along the river on the edge of a forest of pines. At this hour
they looked like a wall into which some magic permitted the wanderer to
walk interminably. Sheila was glad that she did not have to make use of
this wizard invitation. She "cached" her bundle, as Saint Mark had
advised, in a thicket near the stream and walked resolutely forward
along the trail. Not even when her pony had left her on The Hill had she
felt so desolate or so afraid.

She could not understand why she was here on her way to the ranch of this
strange woman. She felt astonished by her loneliness, by her rashness, by
the dreadful lack in her life of all the usual protections. Was youth
meant so to venture itself? This was what young men had done since the
b