d and cold, and from old Joe,
stretched in his blanket, came a deep and peaceful snore.

CHAPTER III

Susan was riding alone on the top of the bluffs. The evening before,
three men returning from the Oregon country to the States, had
bivouacked with them and told them that the New York Company was a
day's march ahead, so she had gone to the highlands to reconnoiter.

Just here the bluffs swept inward toward the river, contracting the
bottom to a valley only a few miles in width. Through it the road lay,
a well-worn path crossed as with black stripes by the buffalo runs.
Susan's glance, questing ahead for the New York train, ran to the
distance where the crystal glaze of the stream shrunk to a silver
thread imbedded in green velvet. There was a final point where green
and silver converged in a blinding dazzle, and over this the sun hung,
emerging from a nebulous glare to a slowly defining sphere.

Turning to the left her gaze lost itself in the endlessness of the
plains. It was like looking over the sea, especially at the horizon
where the land was drawn in a straight, purplish line. She could
almost see sails there, small sails dark against a sky that was so
remote its color had faded to an aerial pallor. As the journey had
advanced the influence of these spacious areas had crept upon her. In
the beginning there had been times when they woke in her an unexplained
sadness. Now that was gone and she loved to ride onward, the one item
of life in the silence, held in a new correspondence with the solemn
immensity. It affected her as prayer does the devotee. Under its
inspiration she wondered at old worries and felt herself impervious to
new ones.

With eyes on the purple horizon her thoughts went back to her home in
Rochester with the green shutters and the brasses on the door. How far
away it seemed! Incidents in its peaceful routine were like the
resurgences of memory from a previous incarnation. There was no
tenderness in her thoughts of the past, no sentiment clung to her
recollections of what was now a dead phase of her life. She was
slightly impatient of its contented smallness, of her satisfaction with
such things as her sewing, her cake making, her childish conferences
with girl friends on the vine-grown porch. They seemed strangely
trivial and unmeaning compared to the exhilarating present. She was
living now, feeling the force of a rising growth, her horizon widening
to suit that which