ude for its warmth. The hills about him were
white now; the pines had lost their greenness to become black
silhouettes against the blank, colorless background Barry Houston had
left May and warmth and springtime behind, to give way to the clutch of
winter and the white desert of altitude.

But withal it was beautiful. Cold, harassed by dangers that he never
before knew could exist, disheartened by the even more precipitous
trail which lay ahead, fighting a battle for which he was unfitted by
experience, Houston could not help but feel repaid for it all as he
flattened his back against the hot radiator and, comforted by the
warmth, looked about him. The world was his--his to look upon, to
dissect, to survey with the all-seeing eyes of tremendous heights, to
view in the perspective of the eagle and the hawk, to look down upon
from the pinnacles and see, even as a god might see it. Far below lay
a tiny, discolored ribbon,--the road which he had traversed, but now
only a scratch upon the expanse of the great country which tumbled away
beneath him. Hills had become hummocks, towering pines but blades of
grass, streams only a variegated line in the vast display of Nature's
artistry. And above--

Barry Houston looked upon it with dazzled eyes. The sun had broken
forth again, to stream upon the great, rounded head of Mount Taluchen,
and there to turn the serried snows to a mass of shell-pink pearl, to
smooth away the glaring whiteness and paint instead a down-like
coverlet of beauty. Here and there the great granite precipices stood
forth in old rose and royal purple; farther the shadows melted into
mantles, not of black, but of softest lavender; mound upon mound of
color swung before him as he glanced from peak to peak,--the colors
that only an artist knows, tintings instead of solid grounds,
suggestions rather than actualities. Even the gnarled pines of timber
line, where the world of vegetation was sliced off short to give way to
the barrenness of the white desert, seemed softened and freed from
their appearance of constant suffering in the pursuit of life. A lake
gleamed, set, it seemed, at an upright angle upon the very side of a
mountain; an ice gorge glistened with the scintillation of a million
jewels, a cloud rolled through a great crevice like the billowing of
some soft-colored crepe and then--

Barry crouched and shivered, then turned with sudden activity. It all
had faded, faded in the blast of a shril