o an intrinsic symbolism of vast open spaces.

Something warned her to go back, but--what harm could there be in just
riding to the top? Only for a moment--a moment in which she could
feast her eyes upon the widespread panorama of moonlit wonder--and
then, they would be in the little town again before the dance was in
full swing. In her mind's eye she saw Endicott's disapproving frown,
and with a tightening of the lips she started her horse up the hill and
the cowboy drew in beside her, the soft brim of his Stetson concealing
the glance of triumph that flashed from his eyes.

The trail slanted upward through a narrow coulee that reached the bench
level a half-mile back from the valley. As the two came out into the
open the girl once more reined her horse to a standstill. Before her,
far away across the moonlit plain the Bear Paws loomed in mysterious
grandeur. The clean-cut outline of Miles Butte, standing apart from
the main range, might have been an Egyptian pyramid rising abruptly
from the desert. From the very centre of the sea of peaks the
snow-capped summit of Big Baldy towered high above Tiger Ridge, and Saw
Tooth projected its serried crown until it seemed to merge into the
Little Rockies which rose indistinct out of the dim beyond.

The cowboy turned abruptly from the trail and the two headed their
horses for the valley rim, the animals picking their way through the
patches of prickly pears and clumps of low sage whose fragrant aroma
rose as a delicate incense to the nostrils of the girl.

Upon the very brink of the valley they halted, and in awed silence
Alice sat drinking in the exquisite beauty of the scene.

Before her as far as the eye could see spread the broad reach of the
Milk River Valley, its obfusk depths relieved here and there by bright
patches of moonlight, while down the centre, twisting in and out among
the dark clumps of cottonwoods, the river wound like a ribbon of
gleaming silver. At widely scattered intervals the tiny lights of
ranch houses glowed dull yellow in the distance, and almost at her feet
the clustering lights of the town shone from the open windows and doors
of buildings which stood out distinctly in the moonlight, like a
village in miniature. Faint sounds, scarcely audible in the stillness
of the night floated upward--the thin whine of fiddles, a shot now and
then from the pistol of an exuberant cowboy sounding tiny and far away
like the report of a boy's pop-gun.