As they came to the opening of the canon, the high mountain-top disappeared; the immediate foothills closed down and shut it out.  The air grew headily light.  Even under the blazing July sun, it came cool to the lungs, cool and intensely sweet.  Thousands of wild flowers perfumed it and the sun-drawn resin of a thousand firs.  All the while the rushing of water accompanied the creaking of Thatcher’s progress.  Not far from the road, down there below in a tangle of pine branches, willows, and ferns, the frost-white stream fled toward the valley with all the seeming terror of escape.  Here the team began their tugging and their panting and their long pauses to get breath.  Thatcher would push forward the wooden handle that moved his brake, and at the sound and the grating of the wheel the horses would stop automatically and stand with heaving sides.  The wagon shook slightly with their breathing.  At such times the stream seemed to shout in the stillness.  Below, there began to be an extraordinary view of the golden country with its orange mesas and its dark, purple rim of mountains.  Millings was a tiny circle of square pebbles, something built up by children in their play.  The awful impersonalities of sky and earth swept away its small human importance.  Thatcher’s larkspur-colored eyes absorbed serenity.  They had drawn their color and their far-sighted clearness from such long contemplations of distant horizon lines.

Now and again, however, Thatcher would glance back and down from his high seat at his load.  It consisted, for the most part, of boxes of canned goods, but near the front there was a sort of nest, made from bags of Indian meal.  In the middle of the nest lay another bundle of slim, irregular outline.  It was covered with a thin blanket and a piece of sacking protected it from the sun.  A large, clumsy parcel lay beside it.  Each time Thatcher looked at this portion of his load he pulled more anxiously at his mustache.  At last, when the noon sun stood straight above the pass and he stopped to water his horses at a trough which caught a trickle of spring water, he bent down and softly raised the piece of sacking, suspended like a tent from one fat sack to another above the object of his uneasiness.  There, in the complete relaxation of exhausted sleep, lay Sheila, no child more limp and innocent of aspect; her hair damp and ringed on her smooth forehead, her lips mournful and sweet, sedately closed, her expression at once proud and innocent and wistful, as is the sleeping face of a little, little girl.  There was that look of a broken flower, that look of lovely death, that stops the heart of a mother sometimes when she bends over a crib and sees damp curls in a halo about a strange, familiar face.

Thatcher, looking at Sheila, had some of these thoughts.  A teamster is either philosopher or clown.  One cannot move, day after day, all day for a thousand days, under a changeless, changeful sky, inch by inch, across the surface of a changeless, changeful earth and not come very near to some of the locked doors of the temple where clowns sleep and wise men meditate.  And Thatcher was a father, one of the wise and reasonable fathers of the West, whose seven-year-old sons are friends and helpmates and toward whom six-year-old daughters are moved to little acts of motherliness.