get up and eat
breakfast. There was a smell of pork and coffee in the air, and there
was scorched corn bread beside the fire on a pan.

Margaret got up quickly and ran down to the water-hole to get some
water, dashing it in her face and over her arms and hands, the squaw
meanwhile standing at a little distance, watching her curiously, as if
she thought this some kind of an oblation paid to the white woman's god
before she ate. Margaret pulled the hair-pins out of her hair, letting
it down and combing it with one of her side combs; twisted it up again
in its soft, fluffy waves; straightened her collar, set on her hat, and
was ready for the day. The squaw looked at her with both awe and
contempt for a moment, then turned and stalked back to her papoose and
began preparing it for the journey.

Margaret made a hurried meal and was scarcely done before she found her
guides were waiting like two pillars of the desert, but watching keenly,
impatiently, her every mouthful, and anxious to be off.

The sky was still pink-tinted with the semblance of a sunset, and
Margaret felt, as she mounted her pony and followed her companions, as
if the day was all turned upside down. She almost wondered whether she
hadn't slept through a whole twenty-four hours, and it were not, after
all, evening again, till by and by the sun rose clear and the wonder of
the cloud-tinting melted into day.

The road lay through sage-brush and old barren cedar-trees, with rabbits
darting now and then between the rocks. Suddenly from the top of a
little hill they came out to a spot where they could see far over the
desert. Forty miles away three square, flat hills, or mesas, looked like
a gigantic train of cars, and the clear air gave everything a strange
vastness. Farther on beyond the mesas dimly dawned the Black Mountains.
One could even see the shadowed head of "Round Rock," almost a hundred
miles away. Before them and around was a great plain of sage-brush, and
here and there was a small bush that the Indians call "the weed that was
not scared." Margaret had learned all these things during her winter in
Arizona, and keenly enjoyed the vast, splendid view spread before her.

They passed several little mud-plastered hogans that Margaret knew for
Indian dwellings. A fine band of ponies off in the distance made an
interesting spot on the landscape, and twice they passed bands of sheep.
She had a feeling of great isolation from everything she had ever known