pines
seemed to bend their lofty branches over her, protectively,
understandingly. Patches of azure-blue sky flashed between the trees.
The great white clouds sailed along with her, and shafts of golden
sunlight, flecked with gleams of falling pine needles, shone down
through the canopy overhead. Away in front of her, up the slow heave
of forest land, boomed the heavy thunderbolts along the battlements of
the Rim.

Was she riding to escape from herself? For no gait suited her until
Spades was running hard and fast through the glades. Then the pressure
of dry wind, the thick odor of pine, the flashes of brown and green and
gold and blue, the soft, rhythmic thuds of hoofs, the feel of the
powerful horse under her, the whip of spruce branches on her muscles
contracting and expanding in hard action--all these sensations seemed
to quell for the time the mounting cataclysm in her heart.

The oak swales, the maple thickets, the aspen groves, the pine-shaded
aisles, and the miles of silver spruce all sped by her, as if she had
ridden the wind; and through the forest ahead shone the vast open of
the Basin, gloomed by purple and silver cloud, shadowed by gray storm,
and in the west brightened by golden sky.

Straight to the Rim she had ridden, and to the point where she had
watched Jean Isbel that unforgetable day. She rode to the promontory
behind the pine thicket and beheld a scene which stayed her restless
hands upon her heaving breast.

The world of sky and cloud and earthly abyss seemed one of
storm-sundered grandeur. The air was sultry and still, and smelled of
the peculiar burnt-wood odor caused by lightning striking trees. A few
heavy drops of rain were pattering down from the thin, gray edge of
clouds overhead. To the east hung the storm--a black cloud lodged
against the Rim, from which long, misty veils of rain streamed down
into the gulf. The roar of rain sounded like the steady roar of the
rapids of a river. Then a blue-white, piercingly bright, ragged streak
of lightning shot down out of the black cloud. It struck with a
splitting report that shocked the very wall of rock under Ellen. Then
the heavens seemed to burst open with thundering crash and close with
mighty thundering boom. Long roar and longer rumble rolled away to the
eastward. The rain poured down in roaring cataracts.

The south held a panorama of purple-shrouded range and canyon, canyon
and range, on across the rolling leagues to the di