ony's expressed a logical purpose. Thus the
speed of their machine-like progress was entirely regulated by the
prospect of a measure of oats at the journey's end.

When they came to the foot-hills and the rider dismounted and led the
way, with a following muzzle at times poking the small of his back, up
the tortuous path, rounding pinnacles and skimming the edge of abysses,
his leg muscles answered with the readiness of familiarity with climbing.
At the top he saw why the pass had received its name of Galeria from the
Spanish. A great isosceles of precipitous walls formed a long, natural
gallery, which the heaving of the earth's crust had rent and time had
eroded. It lay near the present boundary line of two civilizations: in
the neutral zone of desert expanses, where the Saxon pioneer, with his
lips closed on English _s's_, had paused in his progress southward; and
the _conquistadore_, with tongue caressing Castilian vowels, had paused
in his progress northward.

At the other side the traveller beheld a basin which was a thousand
feet higher than the one behind him. It approached the pass at a
gentler slope. It must be cooler than the other, its ozone a little
rarer. A sea of quivering and singing light in the afternoon glow, it
was lost in the horizon.

Not far from the foot-hills floated a patch of foliage, checkered by the
roofs of the houses of an irrigation colony, hanging kitelike at the end
of the silver thread of a river whose waters had set gardens abloom in
sterile expanses. There seemed a refusal of intimacy with the one visible
symbol of its relations with the outer world; for the railroad, with its
lines of steel flashing across the gray levels, passed beyond the outer
edge of the oasis.

"This beats any valley I've seen yet," and the traveller spoke with the
confidence of one who is a connoisseur of Arizona valleys.

He paused for some time in hesitancy to take a farewell of the rapturous
vista. A hundred feet lower and the refraction of the light would present
it in different coloring and perspective. With his spell of visual
intoxication ran the consciousness of being utterly alone. But the egoism
of his isolation in the towering infinite did not endure; for the sound
of voices, a man's and a woman's, broke on his ear.

The man's was strident, disagreeable, persistent. Its timbre was such as
he had heard coming out of the doors of border saloons. The woman's was
quiet and resisting, its quality of