ain.

When she awoke it was broad daylight and far into the morning, for the
sun was high overhead and the mesas in the distance were clear and
distinct against the sky.

She sat up and looked about her, bewildered, not knowing at first where
she was. It was so still and wide and lonely.

She turned to find the Indians, but there was no trace of them anywhere.
The fire lay smoldering in its place, a thin trickle of smoke curling
away from a dying stick, but that was all. A tin cup half full of coffee
was beside the stick, and a piece of blackened corn bread. She turned
frightened eyes to east, to west, to north, to south, but there was no
one in sight, and out over the distant mesa there poised a great eagle
alone in the vast sky keeping watch over the brilliant, silent waste.

CHAPTER XXX

When Margaret was a very little girl her father and mother had left her
alone for an hour with a stranger while they went out to make a call in
a strange city through which they were passing on a summer trip. The
stranger was kind, and gave to the child a large green box of bits of
old black lace and purple ribbons to play with, but she turned
sorrowfully from the somber array of finery, which was the only thing in
the way of a plaything the woman had at hand, and stood looking drearily
out of the window on the strange, new town, a feeling of utter
loneliness upon her. Her little heart was almost choked with the
awfulness of the thought that she was a human atom drifted apart from
every other atom she had ever known, that she had a personality and a
responsibility of her own, and that she must face this thought of
herself and her aloneness for evermore. It was the child's first
realization that she was a separate being apart from her father and
mother, and she was almost consumed with the terror of it.

As she rose now from her bed on the ground and looked out across that
vast waste, in which the only other living creature was that sinister,
watching eagle, the same feeling returned to her and made her tremble
like the little child who had turned from her box of ancient finery to
realize her own little self and its terrible aloneness.

For an instant even her realization of God, which had from early
childhood been present with her, seemed to have departed. She could not
grasp anything save the vast empty silence that loomed about her so
awfully. She was alone, and about as far from anywhere or anything as
she could po