merable particles of light. It
seemed to glow from its very fineness, its silkiness--the kind of hair
one is prompted to touch, to feel if it is really that way! The face
was more wonderful, because it told many things that can not be
expressed in mere hair-language. There was the seal of innocence on
the lips, the proof of fearlessness in the eyes, the touch of thought
on the brow, the sign of purpose about the resolute little chin. The
slender brown hands spoke of life in the open air, and the glow of the
cheeks told of burning suns. Her form, her attitude, spoke not only of
instinctive grace, but of a certain wildness in admirable harmony with
the surrounding scene. Somehow, the ruggedness of the mountains and
the desolate solitudes of the plains were reflected from her face.

The young man gazed as if his thirst would never be appeased. The
flavor of nights about the camp-fire and other nights spent in driving
sleet, also days when the first flowers come and the wide beds of the
desert rivers are swollen with overbrimming floods; the cruel exposure
of winter, the thrilling balminess of early spring--all spoke to him
again from that motionless figure. He recalled companions of his
boyhood and youth, but they were not akin to this child of the desert
mountains. Still more alien were those of the saloon stations, the
haunts at the outskirts of civilization. It seemed to him that in this
young girl, who bad the look and poise of a woman, he had found what
hitherto he had vainly sought in the wilderness--the beauty and the
charm of it, refined and separated from its sordidness and its
uncouthness--in a word, from all that was base and ugly. It was for
this that he had left his home in the East. Here was typified that
loveliness of the unbroken wilderness without its profanity, its
drunkenness, its obscenity, its terrible hardships.

At last he tore himself away, retraced his steps as cautiously as he
had conic, and flung himself upon the pony left waiting at a sheltered
nook far from the cove. As he sped over the plains toward the distant
herd, it came to him suddenly in a way not before experienced, that it
was May, that the air was balmy and fragrant, and that the land, softly
lighted in the clear twilight, was singularly beautiful. He seemed
breathing the roses back home--which recalled another face, but not for
long. The last time he had seen that eastern face, the dew had lain on
the early morning ros