Another long, almost endless day of blatant sun and baked, brown prairie, passing by almost imperceptible degrees into wide plains, flat and dry, cut by wire fences here and there, but no longer checkerboarded in a maddening monotony of pattern. No longer did the houses and red barns succeed one another at exact intervals. In fact they seemed to have almost disappeared and had changed their character, such of them as she saw. They were rough, unpainted board affairs, for the most part, with here and there a more pretentious edifice. But in any case they were scarce and far apart. Low, grass-roofed dugouts also were to be seen at times, but, generally speaking, the view presented almost nothing but an endless vista of rolling, baked plain, covered with scattering grass and dusty gray sage. And then, far ahead, a dim blue line against the horizon, the mountains appeared. When she awoke in the morning they were rolling majestically through wild gorges under towering peaks clad in snow. Pines and firs shaded the slopes, and the biting, rare air of the peaks burned her lungs. She forgot De Launay, forgot the depression that had grown upon her with the realization of the immensity into which she was plunging, and felt her spirit soaring in exhilaration and hopes of success. Mountain born and bred, she reacted buoyantly to the inspiration of the environment. The preposterous nature of her quest, a realization of which had been growing upon her, as the endless miles unrolled before her, was forgotten. She felt at home and at ease in the rugged hills, capable of doing anything she set out to do, no longer fettered with the binding restrictions of civilization and no longer bound by the cold laws of probability. She wanted to summon De Launay, to point out to him the glories of the landscape and to let its purity and strength sink into him for the salvation of his manhood. But he remained aloof, lost, she surmised, in the buffet, drinking illicit liquor with disreputable boon companions. Then, in time, they passed the mountain rampart, though they never again got entirely out of sight of it, and descended into other desolate plains, broken here and there by patches of green and fertile land where villages and farms stood. Beside a leaden, surging inland sea, across a vast plain of alkali, plunging through enormous gorges cut out of the solid, towering rock, they entered mountains again, and again shot out onto barren plains, now, however, rusty brown and rough with broken and jagged lava. Another night was descending when, with defiant shrieks of the whistle, the train shot out upon a vast bench and, with flickering electric lights flashing past the windows, and glass reflecting back its blazing stack, it rolled with tolling bell into a station. The porter appeared. "Sulphuh Falls, ma'am! Hoyeah's whah you gits off!"