Since then both she and her companion had leaned back in their several corners and preserved an unbroken silence. Even the driver’s tongue had showed the benumbing effects of the darkness and cold, and the flow of conversation with which, earlier in the day, he had entertained his fares, gradually languished and died. The surrey sped swiftly along the road which wound in spectral pallor over the shoulder of the foot-hill, now dipping into the blackness of a ravine, then creeping up a bare slope, where the horses’ hoofs dug in laboriously amid loosened stones. The solemn loneliness of the landscape, faintly revealed by the light of large, clear stars, seemed to find appropriate expression in this frosty, smoke-breathing stillness. There was not a sign of human life. The gray patches of fields melted into the clouded darkness of trees. The domes of the live-oaks were like cairns of funereal rock in the open spaces. Steep, woody slopes swept upward, in the daytime shivering coppices of wintry leafage pierced by spires of fir and pine, now densely black and mysterious under the transforming magic of the night. Over all an expanse of sky arched, the vast, calm sky of mountain regions and Nature’s undesecrated places, crystal-clear and velvet-dark, the light of its stars seeming to come, tapping messages in an unknown telegraphy, from illimitable distances. The larger figure on the back seat moved, and turned a face, all of which was hidden save the eyes, toward its companion. “Hungry?” queried a deep bass voice; the inquiring polysyllable shot out suddenly over an upturned bulwark of collars. “Fearfully,” came the answer in a muffled feminine treble, that suited the more diminutive bulk. “Get a move on, Jake,” to the driver. “This girl’s most famished.” “Hold your horses,” growled the other man; “we’re just about there.” At these words the woman pricked up her ears, and, leaning forward, peered ahead. As they rounded a protruding angle of hill, a huddle of roofs and walls spotted with lights came into view, and the sight drew her hand forward with an eagerly-pointing finger. “So that’s Rocky Bar!” she cried. “Have we really got there at last?” The driver chuckled. “That’s Rocky Bar all right. Now get your appetite good and ready.” “No need,” she responded gaily; “it’s been ready and waiting for hours. I was beginning to think that you’d lost your way.” “Me!” with an accent of incredulous scorn. “Ah, get out! How does it come, Governor, that Bill Cannon’s girl don’t know no more about these parts than a young lady from New York?” “She’s never been up here before,” said the man on the back seat, beginning to untangle himself from his enfolding rugs. “I’ve brought her up with me this time to show her some of the places where her pa used to work round with the boys, long before _she_ was ever thought of.”