trier, and the exasperating breeze puffed a
few times and then failed.

An hour later the party had climbed high and was rounding the side of a
great bare ridge that long had hidden the crags. The last burro of the
pack-train plodded over the ridge out of Madeline's sight. She looked
backward down the slope, amused to see her guests change wearily from
side to side in their saddles. Far below lay the cedar flat and the
foothills. Far to the west the sky was still clear, with shafts of
sunlight shooting down from behind the encroaching clouds.

Stewart reached the summit of the ridge and, though only a few rods
ahead, he waved to her, sweeping his hand round to what he saw beyond.
It was an impressive gesture, and Madeline, never having climbed as high
as this, anticipated much.

Majesty surmounted the last few steps and, snorting, halted beside
Stewart's black. To Madeline the scene was as if the world had changed.
The ridge was a mountain-top. It dropped before her into a black,
stone-ridged, shrub-patched, many-canyoned gulf. Eastward, beyond the
gulf, round, bare mountain-heads loomed up. Upward, on the right, led
giant steps of cliff and bench and weathered slope to the fir-bordered
and pine-fringed crags standing dark and bare against the stormy sky.
Massed inky clouds were piling across the peaks, obscuring the highest
ones. A fork of white lightning flashed, and, like the booming of an
avalanche, thunder followed.

That bold world of broken rock under the slow mustering of storm-clouds
was a grim, awe-inspiring spectacle. It had beauty, but beauty of the
sublime and majestic kind. The fierce desert had reached up to meet the
magnetic heights where heat and wind and frost and lightning and flood
contended in everlasting strife. And before their onslaught this mighty
upflung world of rugged stone was crumbling, splitting, wearing to ruin.

Madeline glanced at Stewart. He had forgotten her presence. Immovable
as stone, he sat his horse, dark-faced, dark-eyed, and, like an Indian
unconscious of thought, he watched and watched. To see him thus,
to divine the strange affinity between the soul of this man, become
primitive, and the savage environment that had developed him, were
powerful helps to Madeline Hammond in her strange desire to understand
his nature.

A cracking of iron-shod hoofs behind her broke the spell. Monty had
reached the summit.

"Gene, what it won't all be doin' in a minnut Moses hisself coul