of the tumbling stream, turbulently striving to
care for far more than its share of the melt-water of the hills, a
jaybird called raucously as though in an effort to drown the sweeter,
softer notes of a robin nesting in the new-green of a quaking aspen.
At the hitching post before the one tiny store, an old horse nodded and
blinked,--as did the sprawled figure beside the ramshackle
motor-filling station, just opened after the snow-bound months of
winter. Then five minutes of absolute peace ensued, except for the
buzzing of an investigative bottle-fly before the figure shuffled,
stretched, and raising his head, looked down the road. From the
distance had come the whirring sound of a motor, the forerunner of a
possible customer. In the hills, an automobile speaks before it is
seen.

Long moments of throbbing echoes; then the car appeared, a mile or so
down the canon, twisting along the rocky walls which rose sheer from
the road, threading the innumerable bridges which spanned the little
stream, at last to break forth into the open country and roar on toward
Dominion. The drowsy gasoline tender rose. A moment more and a long,
sleek, yellow racer had come to a stop beside the gas tank, chortled
with greater reverberation than ever as the throttle was thrown open,
then wheezed into silence with the cutting off of the ignition. A
young man rose from his almost flat position in the low-slung driver's
seat and crawling over the side, stretched himself, meanwhile staring
upward toward the glaring white of Mount Taluchen, the highest peak of
the continental backbone, frowning in the coldness of snows that never
departed. The villager moved closer.

"Gas?"

"Yep." The young man stretched again. "Fill up the tank--and better
give me half a gallon of oil."

Then he turned away once more, to stare again at the great, tumbled
stretches of granite, the long spaces of green-black pines, showing in
the distance like so many upright fronds of some strange, mossy fern;
at the blank spaces, where cold stone and shifting shale had made
jagged marks of bareness in the masses of evergreen, then on to the
last gnarled bulwarks of foliage, struggling bravely, almost
desperately, to hold on to life where life was impossible, the dividing
line, as sharp as a knife-thrust, between the region where trees may
grow and snows may hide beneath their protecting boughs and the
desolate, barren, rocky, forbidding waste of "timber line."

Y