thread-like
path--high upon the mountain wall, invisible from the floor of the canyon
below. At a point where the trail turns to round the inward curve of one
of the small side canyons--where the pines grow dark and tall--some
thoughtful hand had laid a small pipe from the large conduit tunnel, under
the trail, to a barrel fixed on the mountainside below the little path.
Here they stopped again and, while they loitered, filled a small canteen
with the cold, clear water from the mountain's heart. Farther on, where
the pipe-line again rounds the inward curve of the wall between two
mountain spurs, they turned aside to follow the Government trail that
leads to the fire-break on the summit of the Galenas and then down into
the valley on the other side. At the gap where the Galena trail crosses
the fire-break, they again turned aside to make their leisure way along
the broad, brush-cleared break that lies in many a fold and curve and kink
like a great ribbon on the thin top of the ridge. With every step, now,
they were climbing. Midday found them standing by a huge rock at the edge
of a clump of pines on one of the higher points of the western end of the
range. Here they would have their lunch.

As they sat in the lee of the great rock, with the wind that sweeps the
mountain tops singing in the pines above their heads, they looked directly
down upon the wide Galena Valley and far across to the spurs and slopes of
the San Jacintos beyond. Sibyl's keen eyes--mountain-trained from
childhood--marked a railway train crawling down the grade from San
Gorgonio Pass toward the distant ocean. She tried in vain to point it out
to her companion. But the city eyes of the man could not find the tiny
speck in the vast landscape that lay within the range of their vision. The
artist looked at his watch. The train was the Golden State Limited that
had brought him from the far away East, a few months before.

Aaron King remembered how, from the platform of the observation car, he
had looked up at the mountains from which he now looked down. He
remembered too, the woman into whose eyes he had, for the first time,
looked that day. Turning his face to the west, he could distinguish under
the haze of the distance the dark squares of the orange groves of
Fairlands. Before three days had passed he would be in his studio home
again. And the woman of the observation car platform--From distant
Fairlands, the man turned his eyes to the winsome face of