t I'm a seafaring man, Miss. I
wouldn't advise it, Miss. Another cup of tea?"

But Long's Peak, king of the range, had fascinated her from the first.
She knew that the climb to the summit would be impossible for her now,
but she had an overwhelming desire to see the terrifying bulk of it from
a point midway of the range. It beckoned her and intrigued her, as the
difficult always did.

By noon of the following day she had left Albert Edward's cabin (he
stood looking after her in the doorway until she disappeared around the
bend) and was jauntily following the trail that led to Boulder Field,
that sea of jagged rock a mile across. Soon she had left the tortured,
wind-twisted timberline trees far behind. How pitiful Cabin Rock and
Twin Sisters looked compared to this. She climbed easily and steadily,
stopping for brief rests. Early in the week she had ridden down to the
village, where she had bought climbing breeches and stout leggings. She
laughed at Albert Edward and his fears. By one o'clock she had reached
Boulder Field. She found the rocks glazed with ice. Just over Keyhole,
that freakish vent in a wall of rock, the blue of the sky had changed
to the gray of snow-clouds. Tenderfoot though she was, she knew that the
climb over Boulder Field would be perilous, if not impossible. She went
on, from rock to rock, for half an hour, then decided to turn back. A
clap of thunder, that roared and crashed, and cracked up and down the
canyons and over the peaks, hastened her decision. She looked about her.
Peak on peak. Purple and black and yellow masses, fantastic in their
hugeness. Chasms. Canyons. Pyramids and minarets. And so near. So grim.
So ghastly desolate. And yet so threatening. And then Fanny Brandeis was
seized with mountain terror. It is a disease recognized by mountain men
everywhere, and it is panic, pure and simple. It is fear brought on by
the immensity and the silence of the mountains. A great horror of the
vastness and ruggedness came upon her. It was colossal, it was crushing,
it was nauseating.

She began to run. A mistake, that, when one is following a mountain
trail, at best an elusive thing. In five minutes she had lost the trail.
She stopped, and scolded herself sternly, and looked about her. She saw
the faint trail line again, or thought she saw it, and made toward it,
and found it to be no trail at all. She knew that she must be not more
than an hour's walk from Timberline Cabin, and Albert Edward, an