rked a little less torture for me; but at that I fell off
Don Carlos when we halted. And I was not able to do my share of the camp
work. R.C. was not as spry and chipper as I had seen him, a fact from
which I gathered infinite consolation. Misery loves company.

A storm threatened. All the west was purple under on-coming purple
clouds. At sight of this something strange and subtle, yet familiar,
revived in me. It made me feel a little more like the self I thought I
knew. So I watched the lightning flare and string along the horizon.
Some time in the night thunder awakened me. The imminence of a severe
storm forced us to roll out and look after the tent. What a pitch black
night! Down through the murky, weird blackness shot a wonderful zigzag
rope of lightning, blue-white, dazzling; and it disintegrated, leaving
segments of fire in the air. All this showed in a swift flash--then we
were absolutely blind. I could not see for several moments. It rained a
little. Only the edge of the storm touched us. Thunder rolled and boomed
along the battlements, deep and rumbling and detonating.

No dust or heat next morning! The desert floor appeared clean and damp,
with fresh gray sage and shining bunches of cedar. We climbed into the
high cedars, and then to the pinons, and then to the junipers and pines.
Climbing so out of desert to forestland was a gradual and accumulating
joy to me. What contrast in vegetation, in air, in color! Still the
forest consisted of small trees. Not until next day did we climb farther
to the deepening, darkening forest, and at last to the silver spruce.
That camp, the fifth night out, was beside a lake of surface water,
where we had our first big camp-fire.

September twenty-first and ten miles from Beaver Dam Canyon, where a
year before I had planned to meet Haught this day and date at noon! I
could make that appointment, saddle-sore and weary as I was, but I
doubted we could get the wagons there. The forest ground was soft. All
the little swales were full of water. How pleasant, how welcome, how
beautiful and lonely the wild forestland! We made advance slowly. It was
afternoon by the time we reached the rim road, and four o'clock when we
halted at the exact spot where we had left our wagon the year before.

Lee determined to drive the wagons down over the rocky benches into
Beaver Dam Canyon; and to that end he and the men began to cut pines,
drag logs, and roll stones.

R.C. and I rode down through