ey had crossed the stream, was at first a
breathless scramble through underbrush. When they reached the big
boulders, Ottenburg went first because he had the longer leg-reach, and
gave Thea a hand when the step was quite beyond her, swinging her up
until she could get a foothold. At last they reached a little platform
among the rocks, with only a hundred feet of jagged, sloping wall
between them and the cliff-houses.

Ottenburg lay down under a pine tree and declared that he was going to
have a pipe before he went any farther. "It's a good thing to know when
to stop, Thea," he said meaningly.

"I'm not going to stop now until I get there," Thea insisted. "I'll go
on alone."

Fred settled his shoulder against the tree-trunk. "Go on if you like,
but I'm here to enjoy myself. If you meet a rattler on the way, have it
out with him."

She hesitated, fanning herself with her felt hat. "I never have met
one."

"There's reasoning for you," Fred murmured languidly.

Thea turned away resolutely and began to go up the wall, using an
irregular cleft in the rock for a path. The cliff, which looked almost
perpendicular from the bottom, was really made up of ledges and
boulders, and behind these she soon disappeared. For a long while Fred
smoked with half-closed eyes, smiling to himself now and again.
Occasionally he lifted an eyebrow as he heard the rattle of small stones
among the rocks above. "In a temper," he concluded; "do her good." Then
he subsided into warm drowsiness and listened to the locusts in the
yuccas, and the tap-tap of the old woodpecker that was never weary of
assaulting the big pine.

Fred had finished his pipe and was wondering whether he wanted another,
when he heard a call from the cliff far above him. Looking up, he saw
Thea standing on the edge of a projecting crag. She waved to him and
threw her arm over her head, as if she were snapping her fingers in the
air.

As he saw her there between the sky and the gulf, with that great wash
of air and the morning light about her, Fred recalled the brilliant
figure at Mrs. Nathanmeyer's. Thea was one of those people who emerge,
unexpectedly, larger than we are accustomed to see them. Even at this
distance one got the impression of muscular energy and audacity,--a kind
of brilliancy of motion,--of a personality that carried across big
spaces and expanded among big things. Lying still, with his hands under
his head, Ottenburg rhetorically addressed the figure