“I suppose this is the top of our ridge, isn’t it?” Bob asked Jack Pollock.

The boy nodded.

Suddenly the trail dipped sharp to the left into a narrow and shallow little ravine.  The bed of this was carpeted by a narrow stringer of fresh grass and flowers, through which a tiny stream felt its hesitating way.  This ravine widened and narrowed, turned and doubled.  Here and there groups of cedars on a dry flat offered ideal shelter for a camp.  Abruptly the stringer burst through a screen of azaleas to a round green meadow surrounded by the taller trees of the eastern slope of the mountain.

In other circumstances Bob would have liked to stop for a better sight of this little gem of a meadow.  It was ankle deep with new grasses, starred with flowers, bordered with pink and white azaleas.  The air, prisoned in a pocket, warmed by the sun, perfumed heavily by the flowers, lay in the cup of the trees like a tepid bath.  A hundred birds sang in June-tide ecstasy.

But Jack Pollock, without pause, skirted this meadow, crossed the tiny silver creek that bubbled from it down the slope, and stolidly mounted a little knoll beyond.  The trained pack horses swung along behind him, swaying gently from side to side that they might carry their packs comfortably and level.  Bob turned involuntarily to glance at Amy.  Their eyes met.  She understood; and smiled at him brightly.

Jack led the way to the top of the knoll and stopped.

Here the edge of the mountain broke into a tiny outcropping spur that shook itself free from the pines.  It constituted a natural lookout to the east.  Bob drew rein so violently that even his well-trained mountain horse shook its head in protest.

Before him, hushed with that tremendous calm of vast distances, lay the Sierras he had never seen, as though embalmed in the sunlight of a thousand afternoons.  A tremendous, deep canon plunged below him, blue with distance.  It climbed again to his level eventually, but by that time it was ten miles away.  And over against him, very remote, were pine ridges looking velvety and dark and ruffled and full of shadows, like the erect fur of a beast that has been alarmed.  From them here and there projected granite domes.  And beyond them bald ranges; and beyond them, splintered granite with snow in the crevices; and beyond this the dark and frowning Pinnacles; and still beyond, other mountains so distant, so ethereal, so delicately pink and rose and saffron that almost he expected they might at any moment dissolve into the vivid sky.  And, strangely enough, though he realized the tremendous heights and depths of these peaks and canons, the whole effect to Bob was as something spread out broad.  The sky, the wonderful over-arching, very blue sky, was the most important thing in the universe.  Compared to its infinitudes these mountains lay spread like a fair and wrinkled footrug to a horizon inconceivably remote and mysterious.