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When she awakened shadows of swaying branches moved on the sunlit canvas above her.  She heard the ringing strokes of an ax, but no other sound from outside.  Slow, regular breathing attested to the deep slumbers of her tent comrades.  She observed presently that Florence was missing from the number.  Madeline rose and peeped out between the flaps.

An exquisitely beautiful scene surprised and enthralled her gaze.  She saw a level space, green with long grass, bright with flowers, dotted with groves of graceful firs and pines and spruces, reaching to superb crags, rosy and golden in the sunlight.  Eager to get out where she could enjoy an unrestricted view, she searched for her pack, found it in a corner, and then hurriedly and quietly dressed.

Her favorite stag-hounds, Russ and Tartar, were asleep before the door, where they had been chained.  She awakened them and loosened them, thinking the while that it must have been Stewart who had chained them near her.  Close at hand also was a cowboy’s bed rolled up in a tarpaulin.

The cool air, fragrant with pine and spruce and some subtle nameless tang, sweet and tonic, made Madeline stand erect and breathe slowly and deeply.  It was like drinking of a magic draught.  She felt it in her blood, that it quickened its flow.  Turning to look in the other direction, beyond the tent, she saw the remnants of last night’s temporary camp, and farther on a grove of beautiful pines from which came the sharp ring of the ax.  Wider gaze took in a wonderful park, not only surrounded by lofty crags, but full of crags of lesser height, many lifting their heads from dark-green groves of trees.  The morning sun, not yet above the eastern elevations, sent its rosy and golden shafts in between the towering rocks, to tip the pines.

Madeline, with the hounds beside her, walked through the nearest grove.  The ground was soft and springy and brown with pine-needles.  Then she saw that a clump of trees had prevented her from seeing the most striking part of this natural park.  The cowboys had selected a campsite where they would have the morning sun and afternoon shade.  Several tents and flies were already up; there was a huge lean-to made of spruce boughs; cowboys were busy round several camp-fires; piles of packs lay covered with tarpaulins, and beds were rolled up under the trees.  This space was a kind of rolling meadow, with isolated trees here and there, and other trees in aisles and circles; and it mounted up in low, grassy banks to great towers of stone five hundred feet high.  Other crags rose behind these.  From under a mossy cliff, huge and green and cool, bubbled a full, clear spring.  Wild flowers fringed its banks.  Out in the meadow the horses were knee-deep in grass that waved in the morning breeze.

Florence espied Madeline under the trees and came running.  She was like a young girl, with life and color and joy.  She wore a flannel blouse, corduroy skirt, and moccasins.  And her hair was fastened under a band like an Indian’s.