Well, there was nothing to do about it but go after them all. Russell made straight for the Corona, a high peak from which the surrounding country could be seen. An hour’s climb through spruce, pine and cedar, so fresh and lovely that it did not seem like winter weather; then a somber glade of hemlock, mysterious, forbidding--and they were out in the open at the top of the world. It was already dark in the canyons far below, but up in these high regions the sun still rode well above the horizon and they could see for miles in every direction; light and shadow, light and shadow, of crest and peak and valley; timberline, where the forest stopped abruptly at creation’s gesture. Raquel was silent under the solemn vast beauty. She had not been up on the Corona in more than a year, and then it was summer. The cold, the quiet, were intense now. The air was strangely still, as it often is just before sunset, and the riders did not feel the cold. Each of them carried field glasses; Russell was already searching the valleys below for whitefaces, the Ranchos cattle, unmistakable even at a distance of several miles. Raquel came out of her dreaming with a start, guiltily. She was the Boss of the Rancho; she’d better be looking for her cattle! Glasses raised, she and Jami scanned the lower levels in different directions. Yes, they were there, full five hundred head all together, Jami thought. Yeah, Russell allowed that many. They’d not move afore mornin’ lessen a blizzard came up and it didn’t look like it from that clear sky. The sun was sinking with sudden speed over the edge of the world. You had a sense of the world’s being round, up there; it curved and dropped away to the horizon. It seemed up there as though it were not such a very big globe after all because you could see all the sides, and you were on the top of it. They were back at Peevey’s in less than an hour, but it was already dark in the forest, and a wind rustled mournfully in the bare branches of the pallid aspen groves. The log cabin was pleasant and warm and smelling of salt pork and frijoles. They were ready to eat again. “Boy, he’s et and gone to bed in the loft,” Ma Peevey indicated as they came in. “He’s clean run out. Had to doctor his legs. Huntin’ cat, he says; but he’s friends with the bars, an’ the bulls an’ the deer too.” “It’s a hard winter,” Pop Peevey mumbled over his food. “Froze tight many a night, withouten any snow, and gonna be worse. Watch out fer the bars and catamounts, says I, and the coyotes and lobos down on the range. “It were just such a winter as this’n when early spring that young engineer took his bride down by the Rio Grande near the dam, an’ she was et by a grizzly. It was after the bacon, an’ they didn’t have no bacon, so the bar took her.” He chewed gloomily on his own salt pork.