on, ever on, up
to the bleak, black hills and into the waterless gullies and through the
rocky gorges where the deer browsed and the savage lurked; then slowly
rising to the pass between the great bold peaks, and across the windy
uplands into Utah, with its verdant valleys, green as emeralds, and its
haze-filled canons and wonderful wind-worn cliffs and walls, and its
pale salt lakes, veiled in the shadows of stark and lofty rocks, dim,
lilac-colored, austere, and isolated; ever onward across Nevada, and
ever westward, up from desert to mountain, up into California, where the
white streams rushed and roared and the stately pines towered, and seen
from craggy heights, deep down, the little blue lakes gleamed like gems;
finally sloping to the great descent, where the mountain world ceased
and where, out beyond the golden land, asleep and peaceful, stretched
the illimitable Pacific, vague and grand beneath the setting sun.

2

Deep in the Wyoming hills lay a valley watered by a stream that ran down
from Cheyenne Pass; a band of Sioux Indians had an encampment there.
Viewed from the summit of a grassy ridge, the scene was colorful
and idle and quiet, in keeping with the lonely, beautiful valley.
Cottonwoods and willows showed a bright green; the course of the stream
was marked in dark where the water ran, and light where the sand had
bleached; brown and black dots scattered over the valley were in reality
grazing horses; lodge-pole tents gleamed white in the sun, and tiny
bits of red stood out against the white; lazy wreaths of blue smoke rose
upward.

The Wyoming hills were split by many such valleys and many such bare,
grassy ridges sloped up toward the mountains. Upon the side of one
ridge, the highest, there stood a solitary mustang, haltered with a
lasso. He was a ragged, shaggy, wild beast, and there was no saddle or
bridle on him, nothing but the halter. He was not grazing, although the
bleached white grass grew long and thick under his hoofs. He looked up
the slope, in a direction indicated by his pointing ears, and watched a
wavering movement of the long grass.

It was wild up on that ridge, bare of everything except grass, and the
strange wavering had a nameless wildness in its motion. No stealthy
animal accounted for that trembling--that forward undulating quiver. It
wavered on to the summit of the ridge.

What a wide and wonderful prospect opened up to view from this lofty
point! Ridge after ridge s