Stewart reached the summit of the ridge and, though only a few rods ahead, he waved to her, sweeping his hand round to what he saw beyond.  It was an impressive gesture, and Madeline, never having climbed as high as this, anticipated much.

Majesty surmounted the last few steps and, snorting, halted beside Stewart’s black.  To Madeline the scene was as if the world had changed.  The ridge was a mountain-top.  It dropped before her into a black, stone-ridged, shrub-patched, many-canyoned gulf.  Eastward, beyond the gulf, round, bare mountain-heads loomed up.  Upward, on the right, led giant steps of cliff and bench and weathered slope to the fir-bordered and pine-fringed crags standing dark and bare against the stormy sky.  Massed inky clouds were piling across the peaks, obscuring the highest ones.  A fork of white lightning flashed, and, like the booming of an avalanche, thunder followed.

That bold world of broken rock under the slow mustering of storm-clouds was a grim, awe-inspiring spectacle.  It had beauty, but beauty of the sublime and majestic kind.  The fierce desert had reached up to meet the magnetic heights where heat and wind and frost and lightning and flood contended in everlasting strife.  And before their onslaught this mighty upflung world of rugged stone was crumbling, splitting, wearing to ruin.

Madeline glanced at Stewart.  He had forgotten her presence.  Immovable as stone, he sat his horse, dark-faced, dark-eyed, and, like an Indian unconscious of thought, he watched and watched.  To see him thus, to divine the strange affinity between the soul of this man, become primitive, and the savage environment that had developed him, were powerful helps to Madeline Hammond in her strange desire to understand his nature.

A cracking of iron-shod hoofs behind her broke the spell.  Monty had reached the summit.

“Gene, what it won’t all be doin’ in a minnut Moses hisself couldn’t tell,” observed Monty.

Then Dorothy climbed to his side and looked.

“Oh, isn’t it just perfectly lovely!” she exclaimed.  “But I wish it wouldn’t storm.  We’ll all get wet.”

Once more Stewart faced the ascent, keeping to the slow heave of the ridge as it rose southward toward the looming spires of rock.  Soon he was off smooth ground, and Madeline, some rods behind him, looked back with concern at her friends.  Here the real toil, the real climb began, and a mountain storm was about to burst in all its fury.

The slope that Stewart entered upon was a magnificent monument to the ruined crags above.  It was a southerly slope, and therefore semi-arid, covered with cercocarpus and yucca and some shrub that Madeline believed was manzanita.  Every foot of the trail seemed to slide under Majesty.  What hard ground there was could not be traveled upon, owing to the spiny covering or masses of shattered rocks.  Gullies lined the slope.

Then the sky grew blacker; the slow-gathering clouds appeared to be suddenly agitated; they piled and rolled and mushroomed and obscured the crags.  The air moved heavily and seemed to be laden with sulphurous smoke, and sharp lightning flashes began to play.  A distant roar of wind could be heard between the peals of thunder.