ws and winds of winter had
washed the charred bark until the boles stood white and ghastly,
infinitely sad and still. No life was here, no flutter or call or hum
of living creatures; and the silence was like a menace. She began to
cast apprehensive glances around her, and was glad to the very core of
her when the forest gradually greened again, and she was in the cool
and friendly shade.

Yet another terrifying experience awaited her,--not terrifying in the
sense of any peril to herself so much as in its vivid suggestion of
peril to Philip Haig. Without warning there came a prodigious crash of
thunder; very near, it seemed. The whole earth rocked and shook, she
fancied, under that smashing blow, and thereupon a savage bellowing
filled the vault of heaven, and the forest quivered with the
reverberations. Hard on the first blow fell another; and then the
strokes descended in a swift and terrible succession, until there was
one continuous and deafening roar like nothing she had ever heard or
imagined. By this she knew that she was now close up under the
frowning battlement of Thunder Mountain; and that a storm had burst
upon that shelterless and unpitied head, with a malevolent timeliness
befitting its ill repute. And somewhere in the midst of that
destroying fury was Philip Haig!

The blue tracery of sky was blotted out; the forest became dark as
night; the tree tops heaved and thrashed about in the wind that rushed
down the mountain side. On the heels of the wind came a drenching
rain, and Marion took what refuge was offered close to the trunk of a
huge pine, which shook and shivered as if it too had nerves that were
unstrung by all this tumult.

It passed, and the sky cleared with what to her seemed extraordinary
swiftness. And when she rode out again to pick up the trail, the air
was indescribably fresh and exhilarating, and the sun was soon
filtering through the foliage upon her pathway.

The trail grew more precipitous, its surroundings more rugged and
wild. Rocks took the place of the soft, mossy soil, and the forest
thinned and shrank. Where there had been monarchs in their majesty she
rode now among stunted pines and dwarf oaks no higher than her head.
And soon she was at timber line, where the beaten and disheartened
trees grew downward, or curled along the earth like serpents, or
spread out in fantastic, unnatural, and monstrous shapes.

And there at last towered the bald head of Thunder Mountain. She coul