here yesterday's thunder-caps, bigger and blacker, with fringed edges,
drove along the sky line. One purplish mass was streaming like a sieve.
For an interval the sun was obscured, and her glance came back to the vale
below where Cerberus reclined, watchful, his tawny head lifted slightly
between two advanced paws. Suddenly the lower clouds grew brilliant, and
shafts of light breaking through changed the mountain before her to a
beast of brass.

She turned and began to pick her way through grease brush and insistent
sage towards a grove of pines. In a little while she saw water shining
through the trees. She hesitated--it was as though she had come to the
threshold of a sanctuary--then went on under the boughs to the opal pool.

She remained in the grove a long time. When she reappeared, the desert
eastward was curtained in a gray film. Torn breadths of it, driven by some
local current of air, formed tented clouds along the promontory. It was as
though yesterday's army was marshalled against other hosts that held the
Chelan heights. A twilight indistinctness settled over the valley between.
Rain, a downpour, was near. She hurried on to the brow of the plateau, but
she dared not attempt to go down around those crumbling chimneys alone.
And Tisdale had said he would come back this side of the vale. Any moment
he might appear. She turned to go back to the shelter of the pines. It was
then a first electrical flash, like a drawn sword, challenged the opposite
ridge. Instantly a searchlight from the encamped legions played over the
lower plain. She turned again, wavering, and began to run on over the
first dip of the slope and along to the first pillar. There she stopped,
leaning on the rock, trembling, yet trying to force down her fear. It was
useless; she could not venture over that stream of shifting granite. She
started back, then stopped, wavering again. After a moment she lifted her
voice in a clear, long call: "Mr. Tis--da--le!"

"I'm coming!" The answer rang surprisingly close, from the gully above the
basin. Soon she discovered him and, looking up, he saw her standing
clear-cut against a cavernous, dun-colored cloud, which, gathering all
lesser drift into its gulf, drove low towards the plateau. She turned her
face, watching it, and it seemed to belch wind like a bellows, for her
skirt stiffened, and the loosened chiffon veil, lifting from her shoulders,
streamed like the drapery of some aerial figure, poised there b