thin wind in the
PINONS. The old, fretted lines which marked one off, which defined
her,--made her Thea Kronborg, Bowers's accompanist, a soprano with a
faulty middle voice,--were all erased.

So far she had failed. Her two years in Chicago had not resulted in
anything. She had failed with Harsanyi, and she had made no great
progress with her voice. She had come to believe that whatever Bowers
had taught her was of secondary importance, and that in the essential
things she had made no advance. Her student life closed behind her, like
the forest, and she doubted whether she could go back to it if she
tried. Probably she would teach music in little country towns all her
life. Failure was not so tragic as she would have supposed; she was
tired enough not to care.

She was getting back to the earliest sources of gladness that she could
remember. She had loved the sun, and the brilliant solitudes of sand and
sun, long before these other things had come along to fasten themselves
upon her and torment her. That night, when she clambered into her big
German feather bed, she felt completely released from the enslaving
desire to get on in the world. Darkness had once again the sweet wonder
that it had in childhood.

II

THEA'S life at the Ottenburg ranch was simple and full of light, like
the days themselves. She awoke every morning when the first fierce
shafts of sunlight darted through the curtainless windows of her room at
the ranch house. After breakfast she took her lunch-basket and went down
to the canyon. Usually she did not return until sunset.

Panther Canyon was like a thousand others--one of those abrupt fissures
with which the earth in the Southwest is riddled; so abrupt that you
might walk over the edge of any one of them on a dark night and never
know what had happened to you. This canyon headed on the Ottenburg
ranch, about a mile from the ranch house, and it was accessible only at
its head. The canyon walls, for the first two hundred feet below the
surface, were perpendicular cliffs, striped with even-running strata of
rock. From there on to the bottom the sides were less abrupt, were
shelving, and lightly fringed with PINONS and dwarf cedars. The effect
was that of a gentler canyon within a wilder one. The dead city lay at
the point where the perpendicular outer wall ceased and the V-shaped
inner gorge began. There a stratum of rock, softer than those above, had
been hollowed out by the action of time