while he looked over the stock with the men.
And Saxon grew the more convinced that the valley she sought lay not
there.

At Redding they crossed the Sacramento on a cable ferry, and made a
day's scorching traverse through rolling foot-hills and flat tablelands.
The heat grew more insupportable, and the trees and shrubs were blasted
and dead. Then they came again to the Sacramento, where the great
smelters of Kennett explained the destruction of the vegetation.

They climbed out of the smelting town, where eyrie houses perched
insecurely on a precipitous landscape. It was a broad, well-engineered
road that took them up a grade miles long and plunged down into the
Canyon of the Sacramento. The road, rock-surfaced and easy-graded, hewn
out of the canyon wall, grew so narrow that Billy worried for fear of
meeting opposite-bound teams. Far below, the river frothed and flowed
over pebbly shallows, or broke tumultuously over boulders and cascades,
in its race for the great valley they had left behind.

Sometimes, on the wider stretches of road, Saxon drove and Billy walked
to lighten the load. She insisted on taking her turns at walking, and
when he breathed the panting mares on the steep, and Saxon stood by
their heads caressing them and cheering them, Billy's joy was too deep
for any turn of speech as he gazed at his beautiful horses and his
glowing girl, trim and colorful in her golden brown corduroy, the brown
corduroy calves swelling sweetly under the abbreviated slim skirt. And
when her answering look of happiness came to him--a sudden dimness in
her straight gray eyes--he was overmastered by the knowledge that he
must say something or burst.

"O, you kid!" he cried.

And with radiant face she answered, "O, you kid!"

They camped one night in a deep dent in the canyon, where was snuggled
a box-factory village, and where a toothless ancient, gazing with faded
eyes at their traveling outfit, asked: "Be you showin'?"

They passed Castle Crags, mighty-bastioned and glowing red against the
palpitating blue sky. They caught their first glimpse of Mt. Shasta, a
rose-tinted snow-peak rising, a sunset dream, between and beyond green
interlacing walls of canyon--a landmark destined to be with them for
many days. At unexpected turns, after mounting some steep grade, Shasta
would appear again, still distant, now showing two peaks and glacial
fields of shimmering white. Miles and miles and days and days they
climbed, with S