began
to affect her strangely. She breathed deeply of it until she felt
light-headed, as if her body lacked substance and might drift away
like a thistledown. All at once she grew uncomfortably sleepy. A dreamy
languor possessed her, and, lying under a pine with her head against
Florence, she went to sleep. When she opened her eyes the shadows of
the crags stretched from the west, and between them streamed a red-gold
light. It was hazy, smoky sunshine losing its fire. The afternoon had
far advanced. Madeline sat up. Florence was lazily reading. The two
Mexican women were at work under the fly where the big stone fireplace
had been erected. No one else was in sight.

Florence, upon being questioned, informed Madeline that incident about
camp had been delightfully absent. Castleton had returned and was
profoundly sleeping with the other men. Presently a chorus of merry
calls attracted Madeline's attention, and she turned to see Helen
limping along with Dorothy, and Mrs. Beck and Edith supporting each
other. They were all rested, but lame, and delighted with the place, and
as hungry as bears awakened from a winter's sleep. Madeline forthwith
escorted them round the camp, and through the many aisles between the
trees, and to the mossy, pine-matted nooks under the crags.

Then they had dinner, sitting on the ground after the manner of Indians;
and it was a dinner that lacked merriment only because everybody was too
busily appeasing appetite.

Later Stewart led them across a neck of the park, up a rather steep
climb between towering crags, to take them out upon a grassy promontory
that faced the great open west--a vast, ridged, streaked, and reddened
sweep of earth rolling down, as it seemed, to the golden sunset end of
the world. Castleton said it was a jolly fine view; Dorothy voiced her
usual languid enthusiasm; Helen was on fire with pleasure and wonder;
Mrs. Beck appealed to Bobby to see how he liked it before she ventured,
and she then reiterated his praise; and Edith Wayne, like Madeline and
Florence, was silent. Boyd was politely interested; he was the kind of
man who appeared to care for things as other people cared for them.

Madeline watched the slow transformation of the changing west, with its
haze of desert dust, through which mountain and cloud and sun slowly
darkened. She watched until her eyes ached, and scarcely had a thought
of what she was watching. When her eyes shifted to encounter the tall
form of