he winding road through thickening
signs of civilization, and just at nightfall rolled into the little town
of Bear Tooth, which is the eastern gateway of the Ute Plateau.

Norcross had given a great deal of thought to the young girl behind him,
and thought had deepened her charm. Her frankness, her humor, her superb
physical strength and her calm self-reliance appealed to him, and the
more dangerously, because he was so well aware of his own weakness and
loneliness, and as the stage drew up before the hotel, he fervently said:
"I hope I shall see you again?"

Before she could reply a man's voice called: "Hello, there!" and a tall
fellow stepped up to her with confident mien.

Norcross awkwardly shrank away. This was her cowboy lover, of course. It
was impossible that so attractive a girl should be unattached, and the
knowledge produced in him a faint but very definite pang of envy and
regret.

The happy girl, even in the excitement of meeting her lover, did not
forget the stranger. She gave him her hand in parting, and again he
thrilled to its amazing power. It was small, but it was like a steel
clamp. "Stop in on your way to Meeker's," she said, as a kindly man would
have done. "You pass our gate. My father is Joseph McFarlane, the Forest
Supervisor. Good night."

"Good night," he returned, with sincere liking.

"Who is that?" Norcross heard her companion ask.

She replied in a low voice, but he overheard her answer, "A poor
'lunger,' bound for Meeker's--and Kingdom Come, I'm afraid. He seems a
nice young feller, too."

"They always wait till the last minute," remarked the rancher, with
indifferent tone.

II

A RIDE IN THE RAIN

There are two Colorados within the boundaries of the state of that name,
distinct, almost irreconcilable. One is a plain (smooth, dry,
monotonous), gently declining to the east, a land of sage-brush,
wheat-fields, and alfalfa meadows--a rather commonplace region now, given
over to humdrum folk intent on digging a living from the soil; but the
other is an army of peaks, a region of storms, a spread of dark and
tangled forests. In the one, shallow rivers trickle on their sandy way to
the Gulf of Mexico; from the other, the waters rush, uniting to make the
mighty stream whose silt-laden floods are slowly filling the Gulf of
California.

If you stand on one of the great naked crests which form the dividing
wall, the rampart of the plains, you can see the Colorado of traditi