Up through a country of bear grass, sage and mesquite he rode, following a well-worn trail. Once over the divide, the way led all downhill. The junipers and pinyons thinned out; yuccas and century plants sprang up among the bear grass, and then, riding out from the last fringe of trees, a mighty red valley lay before him, stretching endlessly northward in yellow and blue and black parapets, with sage-strewn slopes of gravel slanting downwards from their walls. Sid let out a wild whoop of joy as his pony cantered down the winding trail. Free! He was as free as that eagle that soared high above him in the blue--so high as to be a mere wheeling speck in the sky! He was alone with himself and Nature. The pony slowed down as he reached the hot depths of the valley. A dry scoured-out bed of a brook wandered below; here a scummy, shallow pool, yonder the glimpse of shining water where a deep hole in the rocks still held some. None of the thirst terrors of the desert would be his, reflected Sid, as he rode by them; nothing but this inspiring high horizon of a changeless land. Here was the seat of the Infinite, thought the boy, the same last year, the same last century,--the same since the great waters had left this basin bare back in geological time. Of what other place in our country could that be said? The forests and the Indians of the East were gone forever; the prairies and the buffalo of the West were gone. Millions of white men were toiling and struggling to make a living crowded in cities which dotted that land where once was the bounteous plenty of Nature. All the men he knew were fighting a grim battle with Life, just to keep fed and clothed and have a roof over their heads. All the boys he knew were training for that same battle. All of them were tired and weary, and none really enjoyed their lives. All of them would go to their graves with the bitter sense of not having lived at all. None of that for him! And why? puzzled Sid. Well, their lives were all too complex, for one thing. A thousand distractions pressed in on everybody’s time. There was no margin to their lives; no time for ease, for reflection, for communing through books with the great spirits of the past. None at all for those revitalizing periods when man returns to Nature and is born anew. These people spent so much of their time _trying_ to live that they did not live at all! Only worked. What, then, was happiness? The happiest man Sid knew was a young fellow he had met out in Montana, who worked among the homesteaders out in the new red wheat lands, where there was not a school or a church in forty thousand square miles. Among those brave and cheerful folk he was giving his life with a rich enthusiasm, that their sons might have something of an education. And his idealism was so infectious, too, that he had persuaded a young medical student to go out there with him, so that there might be at least one doctor in all that territory.