en called, and he had met many a wagon train bound for California.
He told of Indians and buffalo, thirst and slaughter, wanderings in
snowstorms, and lonely graves in the desert.

The road they followed was a wild and beautiful one. It led up and up,
by granite rocks and stunted pines, around deep ravines and echoing
gorges. The top of the ridge, when they reached it, was a great flat
plain, strewn with white boulders, with the wind howling over it. There
was not one trail, as Thea had expected; there were a score; deep
furrows, cut in the earth by heavy wagon wheels, and now grown over with
dry, whitish grass. The furrows ran side by side; when one trail had
been worn too deep, the next party had abandoned it and made a new trail
to the right or left. They were, indeed, only old wagon ruts, running
east and west, and grown over with grass. But as Thea ran about among
the white stones, her skirts blowing this way and that, the wind brought
to her eyes tears that might have come anyway. The old rancher picked up
an iron ox-shoe from one of the furrows and gave it to her for a
keepsake. To the west one could see range after range of blue mountains,
and at last the snowy range, with its white, windy peaks, the clouds
caught here and there on their spurs. Again and again Thea had to hide
her face from the cold for a moment. The wind never slept on this plain,
the old man said. Every little while eagles flew over.

Coming up from Laramie, the old man had told them that he was in
Brownsville, Nebraska, when the first telegraph wires were put across
the Missouri River, and that the first message that ever crossed the
river was "Westward the course of Empire takes its way." He had been in
the room when the instrument began to click, and all the men there had,
without thinking what they were doing, taken off their hats, waiting
bareheaded to hear the message translated. Thea remembered that message
when she sighted down the wagon tracks toward the blue mountains. She
told herself she would never, never forget it. The spirit of human
courage seemed to live up there with the eagles. For long after, when
she was moved by a Fourth-of-July oration, or a band, or a circus
parade, she was apt to remember that windy ridge.

To-day she went to sleep while she was thinking about it. When Ray
wakened her, the horses were hitched to the wagon and Gunner and Axel
were begging for a place on the front seat. The air had cooled, the sun
was