p to Sprague's cabin, and since she had
stopped riding the black horse, Spades, she walked. Spades was
accustomed to having grain, and in the mornings he would come down to
the ranch and whistle. Ellen had vowed she would never feed the horse
and bade Antonio do it. But one morning Antonio was absent. She fed
Spades herself. When she laid a hand on him and when he rubbed his
nose against her shoulder she was not quite so sure she hated him. "Why
should I?" she queried. "A horse cain't help it if he belongs
to--to--" Ellen was not sure of anything except that more and more it
grew good to be alone.

A whole day in the lonely forest passed swiftly, yet it left a feeling
of long time. She lived by her thoughts. Always the morning was
bright, sunny, sweet and fragrant and colorful, and her mood was
pensive, wistful, dreamy. And always, just as surely as the hours
passed, thought intruded upon her happiness, and thought brought
memory, and memory brought shame, and shame brought fight. Sunset
after sunset she had dragged herself back to the ranch, sullen and sick
and beaten. Yet she never ceased to struggle.

The July storms came, and the forest floor that had been so sear and
brown and dry and dusty changed as if by magic. The green grass shot
up, the flowers bloomed, and along the canyon beds of lacy ferns swayed
in the wind and bent their graceful tips over the amber-colored water.
Ellen haunted these cool dells, these pine-shaded, mossy-rocked ravines
where the brooks tinkled and the deer came down to drink. She wandered
alone. But there grew to be company in the aspens and the music of the
little waterfalls. If she could have lived in that solitude always,
never returning to the ranch home that reminded her of her name, she
could have forgotten and have been happy.

She loved the storms. It was a dry country and she had learned through
years to welcome the creamy clouds that rolled from the southwest.
They came sailing and clustering and darkening at last to form a great,
purple, angry mass that appeared to lodge against the mountain rim and
burst into dazzling streaks of lightning and gray palls of rain.
Lightning seldom struck near the ranch, but up on the Rim there was
never a storm that did not splinter and crash some of the noble pines.
During the storm season sheep herders and woodsmen generally did not
camp under the pines. Fear of lightning was inborn in the natives, but
for Ellen the dazzling