e where Lin Slone taught
Lucy Bostil to ride the great stallion Wildfire.

[Illustration: THERE WAS SOMETHING BEYOND THE WHITE-PEAKED RANGES]

Two days' ride took us across country to the Segi. With this wonderful
canyon I was familiar, that is, as familiar as several visits could
make a man with such a bewildering place. In fact I had named it
Deception Pass. The Segi had innumerable branches, all more or less
the same size, and sometimes it was difficult to tell the main canyon
from one of its tributaries. The walls were rugged and crumbling, of a
red or yellow hue, upward of a thousand feet in height, and indented
by spruce-sided notches.

There were a number of ruined cliff-dwellings, the most accessible of
which was Keet Seel. I could imagine no more picturesque spot. A
huge wind-worn cavern with a vast slanted stained wall held upon a
projecting ledge or shelf the long line of cliff-dwellings. These
silent little stone houses with their vacant black eye-like windows
had strange power to make me ponder, and then dream.

Next day, upon resuming our journey, it pleased me to try to find the
trail to Betatakin, the most noted, and surely the most wonderful and
beautiful ruin in all the West. In many places there was no trail at
all, and I encountered difficulties, but in the end without much loss
of time I entered the narrow rugged entrance of the canyon I had named
Surprise Valley. Sight of the great dark cave thrilled me as I thought
it might have thrilled Bess and Venters, who had lived for me their
imagined lives of loneliness here in this wild spot. With the sight
of those lofty walls and the scent of the dry sweet sage there rushed
over me a strange feeling that "Riders of the Purple Sage" was true.
My dream people of romance had really lived there once upon a time.
I climbed high upon the huge stones, and along the smooth red walls
where Pay Larkin once had glided with swift sure steps, and I entered
the musty cliff-dwellings, and called out to hear the weird and
sonorous echoes, and I wandered through the thickets and upon the
grassy spruce-shaded benches, never for a moment free of the story I
had conceived there. Something of awe and sadness abided with me. I
could not enter into the merry pranks and investigations of my party.
Surprise Valley seemed a part of my past, my dreams, my very self.
I left it, haunted by its loneliness and silence and beauty, by the
story it had given me.

That night we camp