encompassed her and it. Lee sank down, sheltering her
face with her arms against the pelting sand sleet.

But years in the outdoor West had given Lee the primal virtue, courage.
She scorned a quitter, one who lay down or cried out under punishment.
Now she got to her feet and faced the storm. The closeness of her
horizon--her outstretched arms could almost touch the limit of
it--confused the mind of the girl. She no longer knew east from west,
north from south. With a sudden sinking of the heart she realized that
she was lost in this gray desert blizzard.

Blindly she chose a direction and plunged forward. At times the wind hit
her like a moving wall and flung her to the ground. She would lie there
panting for a few moments, struggle to her knees, and creep on till in a
lull she could again find her feet.

How much of this buffeting, she wondered, could one endure and live? The
air was so filled with dust that it was almost impossible to get a
breath. Her muscles ached with the flogging they were receiving. She was
so exhausted, her forces so spent, that the hinges of her knees buckled
under her.

One of her feet struck against a rise in the ground and she stumbled. She
lay there motionless for what seemed a long time before it penetrated her
consciousness that one of her palms pained from a jagged cut the fall had
caused. Her body lay on sharp-pointed rocks. As far as they could reach,
the groping fingers of the girl found nothing but hard, rough stone.
Then, in a flash, the truth came to her. She had reached the Mal-Pais.

She crept across the lava in an effort to escape the strangling wind. Its
rage followed her, drove the girl deeper into the bad lands. A renewal of
hope urged her on. In its rough terrain she might find shelter from the
tornado. In short stages, with rests between, she pushed into the
vitreous lake, dragged herself up from the terrace, fought forward
doggedly for what seemed to her an age.

A crevice barred the way. The fissure was too wide to step across and was
perhaps ten feet deep. Lee slid into it, slipped, and fell the last step
or two of the descent. She lay where she had fallen, too worn out to
move.

It must have been almost at once that she fell asleep.

The stars were out when she awakened, her muscles stiff and aching from
the pressure of her weight upon the rock. The girl lay for a minute
wondering where she was. Above was a narrow bar of starlit sky. The walls
of her pit of re