embered he had thought them fine himself the other day when
there were shadows on them. But to-day! How the sun glared on their ugly
reddish sides! And what was it that had gone wrong anyhow? He could not
seem to remember, and on the whole he did not wish to.

Now Lewis Peckham was neither losing his mind, nor had he been drowning
his sorrows in the conventional dram. The simple fact of the matter was
that he had not slept fifteen minutes consecutively all night long, and
his brain was not likely to clear up until he had given it a chance to
recuperate. By the time he had left the car and climbed the castellated
side of Pine Bluff he was still miserably unhappy, but he had altogether
lost track of the cause of his unhappiness. He strayed aimlessly along
the grassy top of the Bluff, away from the road, and down a slight
incline, into a sheltered hollow. At the foot of a strange,
salmon-colored column of rock was a little group of budding scrub-oaks.
Peckham crawled in among them, and in about thirty seconds he was fast
asleep. There he lay for hours. A blue jay, chattering in a pine-tree
near at hand, made no impression upon his sleep-deadened ear; a pair of
ground squirrels scuttled in and out among the scrub-oaks, peering shyly
at the motionless intruder, and squeaked faintly to one another, with
vivacious action of nose and tail. They were, perhaps, discussing the
availability of a certain inviting coat-pocket for purposes of domestic
architecture. An occasional rumble of wheels on the road, a dozen rods
away, startled the birds and squirrels, but Peckham slept tranquilly on,
and dreamed that the Leitmann Orchestra was playing in the Springtown
Opera House, and that he, by reason of his being an early Christian
martyr, was forced to roast at the stake just out of hearing of the
music.

[Illustration: PINE BLUFF.]

It was well on in the afternoon when he came to himself, to find his
boots scorched almost to a crisp in the sun which had been pouring upon
them. He pulled himself out from among the scrub-oaks, and got his feet
out of the sun. Then he looked at his watch; and after that he looked at
the view.

The view was well worth looking at in the mellow afternoon light.
Peckham gazed across the shimmering gold of the plain, to the mountains,
which stood hushed into a palpitating blue; the Peak alone, white and
ethereal, floating above the foot hills in the sun. Peckham was
impressed in spite of himself. It made hi