She dropped her voice humorously. "No, thank you, I can't stand for Bill's clack." Norcross understood. She didn't relish the notion of being so close to the frankly amorous driver, who neglected no opportunity to be personal; therefore, he helped her to her seat inside and resumed his place in front. Bill, now broadly communicative, minutely detailed his tastes in food, horses, liquors, and saddles in a long monologue which would have been tiresome to any one but an imaginative young Eastern student. Bill had a vast knowledge of the West, but a distressing habit of repetition. He was self-conscious, too, for the reason that he was really talking for the benefit of the girl sitting in critical silence behind him, who, though he frequently turned to her for confirmation of some of the more startling of his statements, refused to be drawn into controversy. In this informing way some ten miles were traversed, the road climbing ever higher, and the mountains to right and left increasing in grandeur each hour, till of a sudden and in a deep valley on the bank of another swift stream, they came upon a squalid saloon and a minute post-office. This was the town of Moskow. Bill, lumbering down over the wheel, took a bag of mail from the boot and dragged it into the cabin. The girl rose, stretched herself, and said: "This stagin' is slow business. I'm cramped. I'm going to walk on ahead." "May I go with you?" asked Norcross. "Sure thing! Come along." As they crossed the little pole bridge which spanned the flood, the tourist exclaimed: "What exquisite water! It's like melted opals." "Comes right down from the snow," she answered, impressed by the poetry of his simile. He would gladly have lingered, listening to the song of the water, but as she passed on, he followed. The opposite hill was sharp and the road stony, but as they reached the top the young Easterner called out, "See the savins!" Before them stood a grove of cedars, old, gray, and drear, as weirdly impressive as the cacti in a Mexican desert. Torn by winds, scarred by lightnings, deeply rooted, tenacious as tradition, unlovely as Egyptian mummies, fantastic, dwarfed and blackened, these unaccountable creatures clung to the ledges. The dead mingled horribly with the living, and when the wind arose--the wind that was robustly cheerful on the high hills--these hags cried out with low moans of infinite despair. It was as if they pleaded for water or for deliverance from a life that was a kind of death. The pale young man shuddered. "What a ghostly place!" he exclaimed, in a low voice. "It seems the burial-place of a vanished race." Something in his face, some note in his voice profoundly moved the girl. For the first time her face showed something other than childish good nature and a sense of humor. "I don't like these trees myself," she answered. "They look too much like poor old squaws."