When they came to the foot-hills and the rider dismounted and led the way, with a following muzzle at times poking the small of his back, up the tortuous path, rounding pinnacles and skimming the edge of abysses, his leg muscles answered with the readiness of familiarity with climbing.  At the top he saw why the pass had received its name of Galeria from the Spanish.  A great isosceles of precipitous walls formed a long, natural gallery, which the heaving of the earth’s crust had rent and time had eroded.  It lay near the present boundary line of two civilizations:  in the neutral zone of desert expanses, where the Saxon pioneer, with his lips closed on English s’s, had paused in his progress southward; and the conquistadore, with tongue caressing Castilian vowels, had paused in his progress northward.

At the other side the traveller beheld a basin which was a thousand feet higher than the one behind him.  It approached the pass at a gentler slope.  It must be cooler than the other, its ozone a little rarer.  A sea of quivering and singing light in the afternoon glow, it was lost in the horizon.

Not far from the foot-hills floated a patch of foliage, checkered by the roofs of the houses of an irrigation colony, hanging kitelike at the end of the silver thread of a river whose waters had set gardens abloom in sterile expanses.  There seemed a refusal of intimacy with the one visible symbol of its relations with the outer world; for the railroad, with its lines of steel flashing across the gray levels, passed beyond the outer edge of the oasis.

“This beats any valley I’ve seen yet,” and the traveller spoke with the confidence of one who is a connoisseur of Arizona valleys.

He paused for some time in hesitancy to take a farewell of the rapturous vista.  A hundred feet lower and the refraction of the light would present it in different coloring and perspective.  With his spell of visual intoxication ran the consciousness of being utterly alone.  But the egoism of his isolation in the towering infinite did not endure; for the sound of voices, a man’s and a woman’s, broke on his ear.

The man’s was strident, disagreeable, persistent.  Its timbre was such as he had heard coming out of the doors of border saloons.  The woman’s was quiet and resisting, its quality of youth peculiarly emphasized by its restrained emotion.

Now the easy traveller took stock of his immediate surroundings, which had interested him only as a foothold and vantage-point for the panorama that he had been breathing in.  Here, of all conceivable places, he was in danger of becoming eavesdropper to a conversation which was evidently very personal.  Rounding the escarpment at his elbow he saw, on a shelf of decaying granite, two waiting ponies.  One had a Mexican saddle of the cowboy type.  The other had an Eastern side-saddle, which struck him as exotic in a land where women mostly ride astride.  And what woman, whatever style of riding she chose, should care to come to this pass?