it came, brought her to her feet.

Now the shadows were deep; all the glory of the sunset in the Eternal
Painter's chaotic last moments of his day's work overspread the western
sky, and from the furnace in which he dipped his brush came a blade of
rich, blazing gold through the pass and lay across the trail. It
enveloped her as, half running, mindless of her footing, slipping as she
went, she hurried toward the other side of Galeria.

When Jack Wingfield came up over the ledge, a pine tassel in his hand,
his languor of other days transformed into high-strung, triumphant
intensity, the sparkle of a splendid hope in his eyes, only Firio was
there to welcome him.

"Senorita Ewold said she no could wait," Firio explained. "It was very
late, she said."

Jack stopped as if struck and his features became a lifeless mask, as
lifeless as the walls of the canyon. He looked down at the trophy of his
climb and ran his fingers over the needles slowly, again and again, in
abstraction.

"I understand!" he said, half to himself; and then aloud: "Firio, we will
not go into town to-night. We will camp on the other side by the river."

"_Si_! I shot enough quail this afternoon for dinner."

But Jack did not have much appetite, and after dinner he did not amuse
Firio with inventions of his fancy. He lay long awake, his head on his
clasped hands, looking at the stars.

XX

A PUZZLED AMBASSADOR

A faint aureole of light crept up back of the pass.

"Dawn at last!" Jack breathed, in relief. "Firio! Firio! Up with you!"

"Oh-yuh!" yawned Firio. "_Si, si_!" he said, rising numbly to his feet
and rubbing his eyes with his fists, while he tried to comprehend an
astonishing reversal of custom. Usually he awakened his camp-mate; but
this morning his camp-mate had awakened him. A half shadow in the
semi-darkness, Jack was already throwing the saddle over P.D.'s back.

"We will get away at once," he said.

Firio knew that something strange had come over Senor Jack after he had
met Senorita Ewold on the pass, and now he was convinced that this thing
had been working in Senor Jack's mind all night.

"Coffee before we start?" he inquired ingratiatingly.

"Coffee at the ranch," Jack answered.

In their expeditious preparations for departure he hummed no snatches of
song as a paean of stretching muscles and the expansion of his being with
the full tide of the conscious life of day; and this, too, was contrary
to custom.

Bef