from east to west.  It trans-figured the round foothills.  They seemed bathed in ethereal light, and the silver mists that overhung them faded while Carley gazed, and a rosy flush crowned the symmetrical domes.  Southward along the horizon line, down-dropping veils of rain, just touched with the sunrise tint, streamed in drifting slow movement from cloud to earth.  To the north the range of foothills lifted toward the majestic dome of Sunset Peak, a volcanic upheaval of red and purple cinders, bare as rock, round as the lower hills, and wonderful in its color.  Full in the blaze of the rising sun it flaunted an unchangeable front.  Carley understood now what had been told her about this peak.  Volcanic fires had thrown up a colossal mound of cinders burned forever to the hues of the setting sun.  In every light and shade of day it held true to its name.  Farther north rose the bold bulk of the San Francisco Peaks, that, half lost in the clouds, still dominated the desert scene.  Then as Carley gazed the rifts began to close.  Another transformation began, the reverse of what she watched.  The golden radiance of sunrise vanished, and under a gray, lowering, coalescing pall of cloud the round hills returned to their bleak somberness, and the green desert took again its cold sheen.

“Wasn’t it fine, Carley?” asked Glenn.  “But nothing to what you will experience.  I hope you stay till the weather gets warm.  I want you to see a summer dawn on the Painted Desert, and a noon with the great white clouds rolling up from the horizon, and a sunset of massed purple and gold.  If they do not get you then I’ll give up.”

Carley murmured something of her appreciation of what she had just seen.  Part of his remark hung on her ear, thought-provoking and disturbing.  He hoped she would stay until summer!  That was kind of him.  But her visit must be short and she now intended it to end with his return East with her.  If she did not persuade him to go he might not want to go for a while, as he had written—­“just yet.”  Carley grew troubled in mind.  Such mental disturbance, however, lasted no longer than her return with Glenn to camp, where the mustang Spillbeans stood ready for her to mount.  He appeared to put one ear up, the other down, and to look at her with mild surprise, as if to say:  “What—­hello—­tenderfoot!  Are you going to ride me again?”

Carley recalled that she had avowed she would ride him.  There was no alternative, and her misgivings only made matters worse.  Nevertheless, once in the saddle, she imagined she had the hallucination that to ride off so, with the long open miles ahead, was really thrilling.  This remarkable state of mind lasted until Spillbeans began to trot, and then another day of misery beckoned to Carley with gray stretches of distance.

She was to learn that misery, as well as bliss, can swallow up the hours.  She saw the monotony of cedar trees, but with blurred eyes; she saw the ground clearly enough, for she was always looking down, hoping for sandy places or rocky places where her mustang could not trot.