couragement. The very waiters glanced at
her apprehensively. It was not that she made a fuss, but her back was
most extraordinarily vocal. One never needed to see her face to know
what she was full of that day. Yet she was certainly not mercurial. Her
flesh seemed to take a mood and to "set," like plaster. As he put her
into the cab, Fred reflected once more that he "gave her up." He would
attack her when his lance was brighter.

PART IV. THE ANCIENT PEOPLE

I

THE San Francisco Mountain lies in Northern Arizona, above Flagstaff,
and its blue slopes and snowy summit entice the eye for a hundred miles
across the desert. About its base lie the pine forests of the Navajos,
where the great red-trunked trees live out their peaceful centuries in
that sparkling air. The PINONS and scrub begin only where the forest
ends, where the country breaks into open, stony clearings and the
surface of the earth cracks into deep canyons. The great pines stand at
a considerable distance from each other. Each tree grows alone, murmurs
alone, thinks alone. They do not intrude upon each other. The Navajos
are not much in the habit of giving or of asking help. Their language is
not a communicative one, and they never attempt an interchange of
personality in speech. Over their forests there is the same inexorable
reserve. Each tree has its exalted power to bear.

That was the first thing Thea Kronborg felt about the forest, as she
drove through it one May morning in Henry Biltmer's democrat wagon--and
it was the first great forest she had ever seen. She had got off the
train at Flagstaff that morning, rolled off into the high, chill air
when all the pines on the mountain were fired by sunrise, so that she
seemed to fall from sleep directly into the forest.

Old Biltmer followed a faint wagon trail which ran southeast, and which,
as they traveled, continually dipped lower, falling away from the high
plateau on the slope of which Flagstaff sits. The white peak of the
mountain, the snow gorges above the timber, now disappeared from time to
time as the road dropped and dropped, and the forest closed behind the
wagon. More than the mountain disappeared as the forest closed thus.
Thea seemed to be taking very little through the wood with her. The
personality of which she was so tired seemed to let go of her. The high,
sparkling air drank it up like blotting-paper. It was lost in the
thrilling blue of the new sky and the song of the