n even when the little horse
stopped on a narrow ledge to breathe. Nor did Cooney tarry. Still
fearful, perhaps, of that deadly backward jerk, he stopped but once
again before the summit was reached. Doubtless he suspected that the
most should be made of this probably fleeting mood of compliance in one
who had hitherto shown herself inveterately hostile to his most
cherished design.

Looking back over the ascent while the stanch little animal panted under
her, Mrs. Laithe discovered that the thing had been worth while. The
excitement had been pleasurable and the view was a thing to climb for.
On the north the valley narrowed to a canyon, its granite sides muffled
in clouds of soft green spruce. To the south it widened away until,
beyond a broad plain, quickened with flying cloud shadows, a long,
low-lying range of blue hills showed hazily, far over the New Mexico
border. Straight before her, across the valley, were mountains whose
rough summits leaped gray and barren above their ragged hemming of
timber--mountains not to be seen from the ranch because of the
intervening mesa.

But the picture was not long to be enjoyed--no longer a time than Cooney
needed to recover his wind. He was presently off through a sparse grove
of aspen, breaking by his own will into a lope as they crossed a wide,
grassy meadow, level between the wooded hills that sloped to its edge on
either side. And this was the horse who, when he bore her lazily up and
down the valley, constantly cropped the good green stuff to right and
left, a horse always before willing to loiter, or to stand motionless
for an hour with his bridle rein on the ground, while she adventured
beyond him on foot. The rider caught his new spirit and laughed as she
felt herself hurried to the consummation of this mild adventure; hurried
up the long ridge, over a cross system of sudden gullies, through
another wide meadow of the mountains where strange cattle paused to
regard her rather disconcertingly; on through the gloom of other woods,
the trail worrying itself up another ascent, and then out upon an open
summit that looked down upon a tiny lake set in a cup of the hills. On
one side the water, its shining surface pierced only by the heaps of
hungry trout, flashed the green of chrysoprase up to the spruce trees
that crept to its edge; on the other it mirrored a scarred wall of rock
that rose sheer from the water to some far, incalculable height, its
summit carved into sembla