The great canyon yawned prodigiously where its rock gates stood open to grant the party admission to the sanctum of the hills.  Sheer granite walls, austere and frowning, rose in sculptured immensity on either side, but the trail under foot was scored between some scattered wild-peach shrubs, interspersed with occasional bright-green clumps of manzanita.  The air was redolent of warmth and fragrance that might with fitness have advertised the presence in the hills of some glorified goddess of love—­some lofty, invisible goddess, guarded by her mountain snows, yet still too languorous and voluptuous to pass without at least trailing on the summery air the breath that exhaled from her being.  It was all a delight, despite vague alarms, and the promise ahead was inviting.

Van continued straight onward, with never so much as a turn of his head, to the horses in the rear.  He seemed to have quite forgotten the two half-frightened women in his wake.  Beth had ample opportunity for observing again the look of strength and grace upon him.  However, she found her attention very much divided between tumultuous joyance in the mountain grandeur, bathed in the marvelously life-exciting air, and concern for the outcome of the day.  If a faint suggestion of pique at the manner in which the horseman ignored her presence crept subconsciously into all her meditations, she did not confess it to herself.

Elsa’s horrid little habit of accepting anything and everything with the most irresponsible complacency rendered the situation aggravating.  It was so utterly impossible to discuss with such a being even such of the morning’s developments as the relationship of mistress and maid might otherwise have permitted.

A mile beyond the mouth of the canyon the slight ascent was ended, the chasm widened, rough slopes succeeded the granite walls, and a charming little valley, emerald green and dotted with groups of quaking aspen trees, stretched far towards the wooded mountain barriers, looming hugely ahead.  It was like a dainty lake of grass, abundantly supplied with little islands.

The sheer enchantment of it, bathed as it was in sun-gold, and sheltered by prodigious, snow-capped summits, so intensely white against the intensity of azure, aroused some mad new ecstacy in all Beth’s being.  She could almost have done something wild—­she knew not what; and all the alarm subsided from her thoughts.  As if in answer to her tumult of joy, Van spurred his pinto to a gallop.  Instantly responding to her lift of the reins, Beth’s roan went romping easily forward.  The bay at the rear, with Elsa, followed rhythmically, pounding out a measure on the turf.

A comparatively short session of this more rapid locomotion sufficed for the transit of the cove—­that is, of the wide-open portion.  The trail then dived out of sight in a copse where pine trees were neighbors of the aspens.  Van disappeared, though hardly more than fifty feet ahead.  Through low-hanging boughs, that she needs must push aside, Beth followed blindly, now decidedly piqued by the wholly ungallant indifference to her fate of the horseman leading the way.