was torn, and the short-stemmed desert-lilies
she held in a moist hand were wilted. But she was happy, for she was
outdoing, she was pretending, and she was punishing. The only thing that
detracted from her pleasure was to be obliged to concur in Cody's
opinion. That roused her perversity. She loved to lead or to oppose--not
to agree.

"Let's go on," she said imperiously. "What are you stopping for?"

As the sun climbed higher, the mountain's top got farther and farther
away. But Cody, who had scaled not only its summit, but the flagpole
that tipped it, knew its habit of piling one small hill up behind the
other, as though, like a grotesque Gulliver playing a practical joke, it
delighted in fatiguing and disappointing the Liliputians that swarmed up
from its base. Crosby and Bombey and the twins, with the Misses
Blind-Staggers,--blinder than ever to-day for the glare on their blue
goggles,--had yielded long since. They were camping patiently in a
ravine far below, where a tiny spring hinted at dining-room
conveniences. The rest of the party, with Irene revenging herself upon
Kate's disloyalty by sticking like a burr to that young lady (whom,
Split thought, Mr. Garvan was treating altogether too much like a young
lady), was close on the vanguard's heels. And Sissy and Cody, panting
now, but toiling doggedly on, had reached the cool little cup-shaped
hollow in the cone where the snow lies.

From here to the top was but a few minutes' run. Cody was all for
halting and snow-balling the party as it came up, but Sissy was too
exhausted to stop now.

"We'll rest at the top of the hill," she decided impatiently, and
hurried him on, both a bit out of temper.

No beauty of winding river and peaceful valley checkered with fields of
grain, no low-lying gardens and climbing forests, reward the scaler of
the heights behind the Comstock--only the bare little brown town far
down, digging tenacious heels into the mountain's side and propped up
with spindle-shanked foothold, the great white inverted cones of steam
rising from the mines, the naked and scarred majesty of the gray
mountains all about, the desert gleaming like a lake in the east, and
Washoe Lake gleaming like a desert in the west.

Yet Sissy held her breath. Something in the still purity of the air, the
savage grandeur of the mountains, the great arch of liquid blue above
her, caught and held her impressionable spirit. She stretched out her
hands--a small, petticoated