d she must be thirty miles from home if she were a step;
across country as the crow flies, perhaps twenty. She was a young woman
of resolution, and she wasted no time in tears or regrets. The XIX
ranch, owned by a small "nester" named Henderson, could not be more than
five or six miles to the southeast. If she struck across the hills she
would be sure to run into one of the barblines. At the XIX she could
get a horse and reach the Lazy D by midnight. Without any hesitation she
struck out. It was unfortunate that she did not have on her heavy laced
high boots, but she realized that she must take things as she
found them. Things might have been a good deal worse, she reflected
philosophically.

And before long they were worse, for the increasing darkness blotted out
the landmarks she was using as guides and she was lost among the hill
waves that rolled one after another across the range. Still she did not
give way, telling herself that it would be better after the moon was
up. She could then tell north from south, and so have a line by which to
travel. But when at length the stars came out, thousands upon thousands
of them, and looked down on a land magically flooded with chill
moonlight, the girl found that the transformation of Wyoming into this
sense of silvery loveliness had toned the distant mountain line to an
indefinite haze that made it impossible for her to distinguish one peak
from another.

She wandered for hours, hungry and tired and frightened, though this
last she would not confess.

"There's nothing to be afraid of," she told herself over and over. "Even
if I have to stay out all night it will do me no harm. There's no need
to be a baby about it."

But try to evade it as she would, there was something in the loneliness
of this limitless stretch of hilltop that got on her nerves. The
very shadows cast by the moonshine seemed too fantastic for reality.
Something eerie and unearthly hovered over it all, and before she knew
it a sob choked up her throat.

Vague fancies filtered through her mind, weird imaginings born of the
night in a mind that had been swept from the moorings of reason. So
that with no sensible surprise there came to her in that moonlit sea of
desert the sound of a voice a clear sweet tenor swelling bravely in song
with the very ecstacy of pathos.

It was the prison song from "Il Trovatore," and the desolation of its
lifted appeal went to the heart like water to the roots of flowers.