On the levels or on the heights, she was day by day finding life a new and a beautiful thing. It was all so good; so fresh, and sweet, and strong! How easily she had fitted into her new surroundings and the new order of things--crude though they were, beyond any of her preconceived ideas. And now how far away seemed all the other Summers she had ever known. She felt that, after all, this was the real life. The other (that which Jean and Lili had their part in) was to her, now, as something known only in a dream. She was learning a grander, fuller sense of living since all that other world was shut away. So (companioned by her would-be lovers, Hume Sherwood and Elwyn Cadwallader, through a Summer of glad, free, full indrawn breaths) she rode the days away, while under the campaign hat she wore her face was being browned by the desert winds. Hot winds. But, oh, how she had learned to love their ardent touch! No sun was ever too hot, nor road too rough or long, to keep her back from this life in the open; and in the saddle she had come to know the valleys and mountains as one born to them. The cañon which held the ruined walls had for her an especial charm, and toward it she often turned her horse’s head. It lay but a short distance from the road leading to her father’s mines. So, turning aside, she often took this short cut through the deserted town. There, one day she heard from Cadwallader the story of Crazy Dan, whose home had once been within the walls that hid the entrance to the tunnel of the Spencer--the mine which had been a gift to Sherwood. Daniel Spencer--Crazy Dan (for whom old Zeke named the claim he had given away, because on the very ground there Dan had made his home) had worked in the creek for placer gold during all the long gone years when others worked the higher ground for silver lodes. An ill-featured, ill-natured old man, having no friends, and seeking none; he had burrowed the cañon’s length for gold as persistently as a gopher does the ground for roots, and--as all had prophesied--with as little showing of the yellow metal. Only a crazy man, they said, would ever have prospected that cañon for gold. It was a cañon for ledges, not placers; for silver, not gold. So the miserly, morose old man followed a phantom to the last; working alone from day-dawn till dusk with rocker and pan, in ground that pitying neighbors vainly tried to lead him away from. Admitting he had never found gold, yet working day after day, Crazy Dan could be seen there for twelve long years. Twelve years of toil that showed no reward for his labor. Then he died. One morning they saw there was no smoke issuing from the cabin chimney; and guessing what they would find, they pushed the door open.