rnoon's ride was
done.

The thickets were merciless. They knew him, those silent evergreens:
they gave no welcome to his breed; and it seemed to him they found a
hundred ways to plague him. Their needles scratched his face, their
branches whipped into his eyes, the limbs dealt cruel blows at his side
and the tree trunks wrenched at his knees. Worse still, they soon came
to a hill that Bill advised they take on foot.

"Not me," Lounsbury shrilled. "I'll swear I won't walk any hills.
You've provided a vicious horse for me, and I'm going to ride him
up if it kills him. I didn't come out here to break my wind on
mountains--and this horse needs the devil taken out of him, anyway."

It was in Virginia's mind that none of the emphatic but genial oaths
that Bill had let slip from time to time grated on her half so much as
this frenzied complaint of her companion, but she kept her thoughts to
herself. But Bill turned with something dangerously like a smile.

"Suit yourself, of course," he replied. "I'm not asking you to walk up
to spare your horse. Only, from time to time a horse makes a misstep on
this hill--just one little slip--and spins down in backward
somersets a thousand feet. If you want to try it, of course it's all
right with me."

He swung off his horse, took the bridle reins of both his own animal and
Virginia's, and started the long climb. And it was to be noticed that
at the first steep pitch Lounsbury found that he was tired of riding and
followed after meekly, but with wretched spirit.

They stopped often to rest; and from the heights Virginia got her first
real glimpse of Clearwater. Her first impression was simply vast and
unmeasured amazement at the dimensions of the land. As far as she could
see lay valley after valley, range upon range, great forests of spruce
alternating with open glades, dim unnamed lakes glinting pale blue in
the afternoon sun, whole valleys where the foot of white man had never
trod. She felt somewhat awed, scarcely knowing why.

Rivers gleamed, marshes lay yellow and somber in the sun, the dark
forests stretched until the eyes tired; but nowhere were there any
homes, any villages or pastures, not a blaze upon a tree, not the smoke
of a camp fire. Bradleyburg was already obliterated and lost in the
depths of the woodland. The silence was incredible,--as vast and
infinite as the wilderness itself. It startled her a little, when they
paused in their climb, to hear t