ater she began to
wonder why this particular road should be so unending and so empty.
Never in her life before had she walked for two hours without seeming to
get anywhere, or without seeing any living human.

Both shoulders were sore from the weight of the bag on the stick, but
the sagebushes looked so exactly alike that she feared she could not
describe the particular spot where the cowboys would find her bag,
wherefore she carried it still. She was beginning to change hands very
often when the wind came.

Just where or how that wind sprang up she did not know. Suddenly it was
whooping across the sage and flinging up clouds of dust from the road.
To Lorraine, softened by years of southern California weather, it seemed
to blow straight off an ice field, it was so cold.

After an interminable time which measured three hours on her watch, she
came to an abrupt descent into a creek bed, down the middle of which the
creek itself was flowing swiftly. Here the road forked, a rough,
little-used trail keeping on up the creek, the better traveled road
crossing and climbing the farther bank. Lorraine scarcely hesitated
before she chose the main trail which crossed the creek.

From the creek the trail she followed kept climbing until Lorraine
wondered if there would ever be a top. The wind whipped her narrow
skirts and impeded her, tugged at her hat, tingled her nose and watered
her eyes. But she kept on doggedly, disgustedly, the West, which she had
seen through the glamour of swift-blooded Romance, sinking lower and
lower in her estimation. Nothing but jack rabbits and little, twittery
birds moved through the sage, though she watched hungrily for horsemen.

Quite suddenly the gray landscape glowed with a palpitating radiance,
unreal, beautiful beyond expression. She stopped, turned to face the
west and stared awestruck at one of those flaming sunsets which makes
the desert land seem but a gateway into the ineffable glory beyond the
earth. That the high-piled, gorgeous cloud-bank presaged a thunderstorm
she never guessed; and that a thunderstorm may be a deadly, terrifying
peril she never had quite believed. Her mother had told of people being
struck by lightning, but Lorraine could not associate lightning with
death, especially in the West, where men usually died by shooting,
lynching, or by pitching over a cliff.

The wind hushed as suddenly as it had whooped. Warned by the twinkling
lights far behind her--lights which m