cloud
near the sun. My mortality blinded me!"

"Now you are a nice boy," she approved more contentedly, "and as a
reward you may ask me one question."

"All right," he agreed; and then, with instinctive tact, "What do you
see up there?"

He could hear her clap her hands with delight, and he felt glad that he
had followed his impulse to ask just this question instead of one more
personal and more in line with his curiosity.

"Listen!" she began. "I see pines, many pines, just the tops of them,
and they are all waving in the breeze. Did you ever see trees from on
top? They are quite different. And out from the pines come great round
hills made all of stone. I think they look like skulls. Then there are
breathless descents where the pines fall away. Once in a while a little
white road flashes out."

"Yes," urged Bennington, as the voice paused. "And what else do you
see?"

"I see the prairie, too," she went on half dreamily. "It is brown now,
but the green is beginning to shine through it just a very little. And
out beyond there is a sparkle. That is the Cheyenne. And beyond that
there is something white, and that is the Bad Lands."

The voice broke off with a happy little laugh.

Bennington saw the scene as though it lay actually spread out before
him. There was something in the choice of the words, clearcut,
decisive, and descriptive; but more in the exquisite modulations of the
voice, adding here a tint, there a shade to the picture, and casting
over the whole that poetic glamour which, rarely, is imitated in
grosser materials by Nature herself, when, just following sunset, she
suffuses the landscape with a mellow afterglow.

The head, sunbonneted, reappeared perked inquiringly sideways.

"Hello, stranger!" it called with a nasal inflection, "how air ye? Do
y' think minin' is goin' t' pan out well this yar spring?" Then she
caught sight of his weapon. "What are you going to shoot?" she asked
with sudden interest.

"I thought I might see a deer."

"Deer! hoh!" she cried in lofty scorn, reassuming her nasal tone. "You
is shore a tenderfoot! Don' you-all know that blastin' scares all th'
deer away from a minin' camp?"

Bennington looked confused. "No, I hadn't thought of that," he
confessed stoutly enough.

"I kind of like to shoot!" said she, a little wistfully. "What sort of
a gun is it?"

"A Savage smokeless," answered Bennington perfunctorily.

"One of the thirty-calibres?" inquired the sunbonnet