ne tall pine tree across the chasm. Musical phrases
drove each other rapidly through her mind, and the song of the cicada
was now too long and too sharp. Everything seemed suddenly to take the
form of a desire for action.

It was while she was in this abstracted state, waiting for the clock to
strike, that Thea at last made up her mind what she was going to try to
do in the world, and that she was going to Germany to study without
further loss of time. Only by the merest chance had she ever got to
Panther Canyon. There was certainly no kindly Providence that directed
one's life; and one's parents did not in the least care what became of
one, so long as one did not misbehave and endanger their comfort. One's
life was at the mercy of blind chance. She had better take it in her own
hands and lose everything than meekly draw the plough under the rod of
parental guidance. She had seen it when she was at home last
summer,--the hostility of comfortable, self-satisfied people toward any
serious effort. Even to her father it seemed indecorous. Whenever she
spoke seriously, he looked apologetic. Yet she had clung fast to
whatever was left of Moonstone in her mind. No more of that! The
Cliff-Dwellers had lengthened her past. She had older and higher
obligations.

V

ONE Sunday afternoon late in July old Henry Biltmer was rheumatically
descending into the head of the canyon. The Sunday before had been one
of those cloudy days--fortunately rare--when the life goes out of that
country and it becomes a gray ghost, an empty, shivering uncertainty.
Henry had spent the day in the barn; his canyon was a reality only when
it was flooded with the light of its great lamp, when the yellow rocks
cast purple shadows, and the resin was fairly cooking in the corkscrew
cedars. The yuccas were in blossom now. Out of each clump of sharp
bayonet leaves rose a tall stalk hung with greenish-white bells with
thick, fleshy petals. The niggerhead cactus was thrusting its crimson
blooms up out of every crevice in the rocks.

Henry had come out on the pretext of hunting a spade and pick-axe that
young Ottenburg had borrowed, but he was keeping his eyes open. He was
really very curious about the new occupants of the canyon, and what they
found to do there all day long. He let his eye travel along the gulf for
a mile or so to the first turning, where the fissure zigzagged out and
then receded behind a stone promontory on which stood the yellowish,