by the sun, as if in it were enmeshed innumerable particles of
light. It seemed to glow from its very fineness, its silkiness--the
kind of hair one is prompted to touch, to feel if it is really that
way! The face was more wonderful, because it told many things that
can not be expressed in mere hair-language. There was the seal of
innocence on the lips, the proof of fearlessness in the eyes, the
touch of thought on the brow, the sign of purpose about the resolute
little chin. The slender brown hands spoke of life in the open air,
and the glow of the cheeks told of burning suns. Her form, her
attitude, spoke not only of instinctive grace, but of a certain
wildness in admirable harmony with the surrounding scene. Somehow,
the ruggedness of the mountains and the desolate solitudes of the
plains were reflected from her face.

The young man gazed as if his thirst would never be appeased. The
flavor of nights about the camp-fire and other nights spent in
driving sleet, also days when the first flowers come and the wide
beds of the desert rivers are swollen with overbrimming floods; the
cruel exposure of winter, the thrilling balminess of early
spring--all spoke to him again from that motionless figure. He
recalled companions of his boyhood and youth, but they were not akin
to this child of the desert mountains. Still more alien were those
of the saloon stations, the haunts at the outskirts of civilization.
It seemed to him that in this young girl, who bad the look and poise
of a woman, he had found what hitherto he had vainly sought in the
wilderness--the beauty and the charm of it, refined and separated
from its sordidness and its uncouthness--in a word, from all that
was base and ugly. It was for this that he had left his home in the
East. Here was typified that loveliness of the unbroken wilderness
without its profanity, its drunkenness, its obscenity, its terrible