By crossing and recrossing the tiny creeks that trickled slow and obstructed through the gaunt levels of plain and foot-hill, she had come by a direct route to the fringes of the pine country.  And here she found a world dim, green, and mysterious.  It was wellnigh inconceivable that the land of sage-brush and silence could, within walking distance of desolation, show such wealth of young timber, such shade and beauty.  Her noiseless footfalls scarce startled a sage-hen that, realizing too late her presence, froze to the dead stump—­a ruffled gray excrescence with glittering bead eyes that stared at her furtively, the one live thing in the tense body.

The sun wanted an hour of noon when Judith rested by the stream, bathed her face and hands, flushed from the long walk, ate the bread and meat, then lay on the bed of pine-needles, brown and soft from the weathering of many suns and snows.  She had been all day in the company she loved best—­ the earth, the sky, the sun and wind—­and in her heart at last was a deep tranquillity.  Thus she could face life and ask nothing but to watch the cloud fleeces as they are spun and heaped high in the long days of summer; in soberer moods to watch the thoughts of the Great Mystery as He reveals them in the shifting cloud shapes; to penetrate further and further into the councils of the great forces.  Thus did she dream the moments away till the sun was high in the blue and threw long, yellow splashes of light on her still body, on the soft pine-needles, beneath the boughs.  But there was no time for further day-dreams if she intended to forestall the hunters at the place of nooning.  She followed a game trail that lay along the stream, ascending through the dense growths till she reached the top of the jutting rocks.  Her hair was loosened, her skirt awry, and the pine-needles stood out from it as from a cushion.  Much of the way she gained by creeping beneath the low branches on her hands and knees.  No white woman would be likely to follow her reasoned the daughter of the plains.  It would be a little too hard on her appearance.  And here, by lying flat and hanging over the jutting knob of rock, with a pine branch in her hand, she could see this mysterious woman and Peter and the hunters.

She broke a branch to shade her face, she looked down on the grassy level.  She waited, but there was no sound of hoofs falling muffled on the soft ground.  The shadows of the pines contended with the splashes of sunlight for the little world beneath the trees.  They trembled in mimic battle, then the shadows stole the sunlight, bit by bit, till all was pale-green twilight, and there was no sound of the hunters.