For Wade, and for countless men like him, who for many years had roamed the West, this sleeping alone in wild places held both charm and peril.  But the fascination of it was only a vague realization, and the danger was laughed at.

Over Bent Wade’s quiet form the shadows played, the spruce boughs waved, the piny needles rustled down, the wind moaned louder as the night advanced.  By and by the horses rested from their grazing; the insects ceased to hum; and the continuous roar of water dominated the solitude.  If wild animals passed Wade’s camp they gave it a wide berth.

* * * * *

Sunrise found Wade on the trail, climbing high up above the lake, making for the pass over the range.  He walked, leading his horses up a zigzag trail that bore the tracks of recent travelers.  Although this country was sparsely settled, yet there were men always riding from camp to camp or from one valley town to another.  Wade never tarried on a well-trodden trail.

As he climbed higher the spruce-trees grew smaller, no longer forming a green aisle before him, and at length they became dwarfed and stunted, and at last failed altogether.  Soon he was above timber-line and out upon a flat-topped mountain range, where in both directions the land rolled and dipped, free of tree or shrub, colorful with grass and flowers.  The elevation exceeded eleven thousand feet.  A whipping wind swept across the plain-land.  The sun was pale-bright in the east, slowly being obscured by gray clouds.  Snow began to fall, first in scudding, scanty flakes, but increasing until the air was full of a great, fleecy swirl.  Wade rode along the rim of a mountain wall, watching a beautiful snow-storm falling into the brown gulf beneath him.  Once as he headed round a break he caught sight of mountain-sheep cuddled under a protecting shelf.  The snow-squall blew away, like a receding wall, leaving grass and flowers wet.  As the dark clouds parted, the sun shone warmer out of the blue.  Gray peaks, with patches of white, stood up above their black-timbered slopes.

Wade soon crossed the flat-topped pass over the range and faced a descent, rocky and bare at first, but yielding gradually to the encroachment of green.  He left the cold winds and bleak trails above him.  In an hour, when he was half down the slope, the forest had become warm and dry, fragrant and still.  At length he rode out upon the brow of a last wooded bench above a grassy valley, where a bright, winding stream gleamed in the sun.  While the horses rested Wade looked about him.  Nature never tired him.  If he had any peace it emanated from the silent places, the solemn hills, the flowers and animals of the wild and lonely land.

A few straggling pines shaded this last low hill above the valley.  Grass grew luxuriantly there in the open, but not under the trees, where the brown needle-mats jealously obstructed the green.  Clusters of columbines waved their graceful, sweet, pale-blue flowers that Wade felt a joy in seeing.  He loved flowers—­columbines, the glory of Colorado, came first, and next the many-hued purple asters, and then the flaunting spikes of paint-brush, and after them the nameless and numberless wild flowers that decked the mountain meadows and colored the grass of the aspen groves and peeped out of the edge of snow fields.