sire. Branching south in hurried
turns and multiple windings it climbs the rolling hills, ever dodging
the rude-piled masses of rock, with scattered brush between, but forever
aspiring courageously through the mountain sage and sunshine toward its
ultimate green rest in the shadowy hills.

In the sweet sage is the drone of bees, like the hum of a far city. The
thinning, acrid air is tinged with the faint fragrance of sunburnt
shrubs and grasses.

With the sinuous avoidings of a baffled snake the road turns and turns
upon itself until its earlier promise of high adventuring seems
doubtful. As often as not it climbs a semi-barren dun stretch of
sunbaked earth dotted with stubby cacti--passes these dwarfed
grotesques, and attempts the narrowing crest of the canon-wall, to swing
abruptly back to the cacti again, gaining but little in its upward
trend.

Impatient, it finally plunges dizzily round a sharp, outstanding angle
of rock and down into the unexpected enchantment of Moonstone Canon.
Here the gaunt cliffs rise to great wild gardens, draped with soft rose
and poignant red amid drowsy undertones of gray and green and gold. Dots
of vivid colors flame and fade and pass to ledges of dank, vineclad rock
and drifts of shale, as the road climbs again.

At the next turn are the indistinct voices of water, commingling in a
monotone--and the road ceases to be, as the cool silver of a mountain
stream cuts through it, with seemingly inconsequential meanderings, but
with the soft arrogance of a power too great to be denied. And the
indistinct voices, left behind, fade to unimaginable sounds as the
stream patters down its gravelly course, contented beyond measure with
its own adventuring.

Patiently the road takes up its way, moving in easier sweeps through a
widening valley, but forever climbing.

Again and again, fetlock deep across it runs the stream, gently
persistent and forever murmuring its happy soliloquies.

Here and there the road passes quickly through a blot of shade,--a group
of wide-spreading live-oaks,--and reappears, gray-white and hot in the
sun.

And then, its high ambition fulfilled, the road recovers from its last
climbing sweep round the base of a shouldering hill and runs straight
and smooth to its ultimate green rest in the shade of the sycamores.
Beyond these two huge-limbed warders of the mountain ranch gate, there
is a flower-bordered _way_, but it is the road no longer.

The mountain ranch tak