times."

"If I could make her see the marvelous beauty of this way we go, but
she will not look. Me, I can hardly breathe for the wonder--yet--I do
not forget my father is dead."

"I'm starting you off now, because it will not be so hard on either
you or the horses to travel by night, as long as it is light enough to
see the way. Then when the sun comes out hot, we can lie by a bit, as
we did yesterday."

"Then is no fear of the red men we met on the plains?"

"They're not likely to follow us up here--not at this season, and now
the railroad's going through, they're attracted by that."

"Do they never come to you, at your home?"

"Not often. They think I'm a sort of white 'medicine man'--kind of a
hoodoo, and leave me alone."

She looked at him with mystification in her eyes, but did not ask what
he meant, and returned to her mother.

"I have eaten. Now we go, is not?"

"Yes, mother. The kind man says we go on, and the red men will not
follow us."

"Good. I have afraid of the men 'rouge.' Your father knows not fear;
only I know it."

Soon they were mounted and traveling up the trail as before, the
little pack mule following in the rear. No breeze stirred to make the
frosty air bite more keenly, and the women rode in comparative
comfort, with their hands wrapped in their shawls to keep them warm.
They did not try to converse, or only uttered a word now and then in
their own tongue. Amalia's spirit was enrapt in the beauty around and
above and below her, so that she could not have spoken more than the
merest word for a reply had she tried.

The moonlight brought all the immediate surroundings into sharp
relief, and the distant hills in receding gradations seemed to be
created out of molten silver touched with palest gold. Above, the
vault of the heavens was almost black, and the stars were few, but
clear. Even the stones that impeded the horses' feet seemed to be made
of silver. The depths below them seemed as vast and black as the vault
above, except for the silver bath of light that touched the tops of
the gigantic trees at the bottom of the canyon around which they were
climbing.

The silence of this vastness was as fraught with mystery as the scene,
and was broken only by the scrambling of the horses over the stones
and their heavy breathing. Thus throughout the rest of the night they
wended steadily upward, only pausing now and then to allow the animals
to breathe, and then on. At last a thing occur