gle command they sailed down off the
heights; and the cedar forest became the centre of a blinding, eddying
storm. The flakes were as large as feathers, moist, almost warm. The low
cedars changed to mounds of white; the sheep became drooping curves of
snow; the little lambs were lost in the color of their own pure fleece.
Though the storm had been long in coming it was brief in passing.
Wind-driven toward the desert, it moaned its last in the cedars, and
swept away, a sheeted pall. Out over the Canyon it floated, trailing
long veils of white that thinned out, darkened, and failed far above the
golden desert. The winding columns of snow merged into straight lines of
leaden rain; the rain flowed into vapory mist, and the mist cleared in
the gold-red glare of endless level and slope. No moisture reached the
parched desert.

Jack marched into camp with a snowy burden over his shoulder. He flung
it down, disclosing a small deer; then he shook the white mantle from
his coat, and whistling, kicked the fire-logs, and looked abroad at
the silver cedars, now dripping under the sun, at the rainbows in the
settling mists, at the rapidly melting snow on the ground.

"Got lost in that squall. Fine! Fine!" he exclaimed, and threw wide his
arms.

"Jack!" said Mescal. "Jack!" Memory had revived some forgotten thing.
The dark olive of her skin crimsoned; her eyes dilated and shadowed with
a rare change of emotion.

"Jack," she repeated.

"Well?" he replied, in surprise.

"To look at you!--I never dreamed--I'd forgotten--"

"What's the matter with me?" demanded Jack.

Wonderingly, her mind on the past, she replied: "You were dying when we
found you at White Sage."

He drew himself up with a sharp catch in his breath, and stared at her
as if he saw a ghost.

"Oh--Jack! You're going to get well!"

Her lips curved in a smile.

For an instant Jack Hare spent his soul in searching her face for truth.
While waiting for death he had utterly forgotten it; he remembered now,
when life gleamed in the girl's dark eyes. Passionate joy flooded his
heart.

"Mescal--Mescal!" he cried, brokenly. The eyes were true that shed this
sudden light on him; glad and sweet were the lips that bade him hope and
live again. Blindly, instinctively he kissed them--a kiss unutterably
grateful; then he fled into the forest, running without aim.

That flight ended in sheer exhaustion on the far rim of the plateau. The
spreading cedars seemed to have ey