The door of the cabin opened with a sharp thrust and Sheila stepped out.  She walked quickly through the firs and stood on the edge of the open range-land, beyond and below which began the dark ridge of the primeval woods.  She stood perfectly still and lifted her face to the sky.  For all the blaze of the moon the greater stars danced in radiance.  Their constellations sloped nobly across her dazzled vision.  She had come very close to madness, and now her brain was dumb and dark as though it had been shut into a blank-walled cell.  She stood with her hands hanging.  She had no will nor wish to pray.  The knowledge had come to her that if she went out and looked this winter Pan in the face, her brain would snap, either to life or death.  It would burst its prison ...  She stared, wide-eyed, dry-eyed, through the immense cold height of air up at the stars.

All at once a door flew open in her soul and she knew God ... no visible presence and yet an enveloping reality, the God of the savage earth, of the immense sky, of the stars, the God unsullied and untempted by man’s worship, no God that she had ever known, had ever dreamed of, had ever prayed to before.  She did not pray to Him now.  She let her soul stand open till it was filled as were the stars and the earth with light....

The next day Sheila found her voice and sang at her work.  She gave herself an overwhelming task of cleaning and scrubbing.  She was on her knees like a charwoman, sniffing the strong reek of suds, when there came a knocking at her door.  She leapt up with pounding heart.  But the knocking was more like a scraping and it was followed by a low whine.  For a second Sheila’s head filled with a fog of terror and then came a homely little begging bark, just the throaty, snuffling sob of a homeless puppy.  Sheila took Cosme’s six-shooter, saw that it was loaded, and, standing in the shelter of the door, she slowly opened it.  A few moments later the gun lay a yard away on the soapy, steaming floor and Berg was held tight in her arms.  His ecstasy of greeting was no greater than her ecstasy of welcome.  She cried and laughed and hugged and kissed him.  That night, after a mighty supper, he slept on her bed across her feet.  Two or three times she woke and reached her hand down to caress his rough thick coat.  The warmth of his body mounted from her feet to her heart.  She thought that he had been sent to her by that new God.  As for Berg, he had found his God again, the taming touch of a small human hand.

* * * * *

It was in May, one morning in May—­she had long ago lost count of her days—­when Sheila stepped across her sill and saw the ground.  Just a patch it was, no bigger than a tablecloth, but it made her catch her breath.  She knelt down and ran her hands across it, sifted some gravel through her fingers.  How strange and various and colorful were the atoms of stone, rare as jewels to her eyes so long used to the white and violet monotony of snow.  Beyond the gravel, at the very edge of the drift, a slender crescent of green startled her eyes and—­yes—­there were a dozen valorous little golden flowers, as flat and round as fairy doubloons.