These incidents were new and pleasing to Shefford.  How ignorant he had been of life in the wilderness!  Once more he received subtle intimations of what he might learn out in the open; and it was with a less weighted heart that he faced the gateway between the huge yellow bluffs on his left and the slow rise of ground to the black mesa on his right.  He looked back in time to see the trading-post, bleak and lonely on the bare slope, pass out of sight behind the bluffs.  Shefford felt no fear—­he really had little experience of physical fear—­but it was certain that he gritted his teeth and welcomed whatever was to come to him.  He had lived a narrow, insulated life with his mind on spiritual things; his family and his congregation and his friends—­except that one new friend whose story had enthralled him—­were people of quiet religious habit; the man deep down in him had never had a chance.  He breathed hard as he tried to imagine the world opening to him, and almost dared to be glad for the doubt that had sent him adrift.

The tracks of the Indian girl’s pony were plain in the sand.  Also there were other tracks, not so plain, and these Shefford decided had been made by Willetts and the girl the day before.  He climbed a ridge, half soft sand and half hard, and saw right before him, rising in striking form, two great yellow buttes, like elephant legs.  He rode between them, amazed at their height.  Then before him stretched a slowly ascending valley, walled on one side by the black mesa and on the other by low bluffs.  For miles a dark-green growth of greasewood covered the valley, and Shefford could see where the green thinned and failed, to give place to sand.  He trotted his horse and made good time on this stretch.

The day contrasted greatly with any he had yet experienced.  Gray clouds obscured the walls of rock a few miles to the west, and Shefford saw squalls of snow like huge veils dropping down and spreading out.  The wind cut with the keenness of a knife.  Soon he was chilled to the bone.  A squall swooped and roared down upon him, and the wind that bore the driving white pellets of snow, almost like hail, was so freezing bitter cold that the former wind seemed warm in comparison.  The squall passed as swiftly as it had come, and it left Shefford so benumbed he could not hold the bridle.  He tumbled off his horse and walked.  By and by the sun came out and soon warmed him and melted the thin layer of snow on the sand.  He was still on the trail of the Indian girl, but hers were now the only tracks he could see.

All morning he gradually climbed, with limited view, until at last he mounted to a point where the country lay open to his sight on all sides except where the endless black mesa ranged on into the north.  A rugged yellow peak dominated the landscape to the fore, but it was far away.  Red and jagged country extended westward to a huge flat-topped wall of gray rock.  Lowering swift clouds swept across the