A turn in the trail hid the motionless figure at the halting place for the time, though he could still see the others making their toilful way onward and upward over the rock-strewn talus. As he drew nearer to the one who had been left behind, the rock, upon one of the lower shelf-like ledges of which she was sitting, kept him from getting a fair sight of her, and it was not until he was about to go on past her that he saw who she was and stopped short. “_Jean!_” he gasped. She stood up and held out both hands to him, and what she said appeared to take no account of anything that had intervened, save the lapse of time. “You, Philip? I wonder if I’m dreaming? Is it really you--after all these months? Where did you come from?” “Out of a pretty mucky hole in the ground, as you’d imagine,” he grinned, looking down at his earth-stained corduroys and boots. “But tell me: how under the canopy did you get here?” “‘Canopy,’” she smiled; “that is New England, isn’t it? We came on the train. Harry brought us--Mysie and me--just for a little outing. We left Leadville this morning. But I hadn’t the slightest idea that we’d find you up here.” “Just one of Harry’s little jokes, I suppose. I think he meant it to be a surprise, all around. I wrote him last week and told him where we were--Big Jim Garth and I--and how we could be reached, now that the snows have melted. I thought perhaps he might care to run up and have a look at Jim’s prospect. It isn’t a bonanza, but Jim can probably sell it for enough, with the development work we’ve done, to take care of him in his old age.” “You have been working with him all winter?” “Yes. We were snowed in most of the time, but that didn’t matter. We had plenty to eat. But this morning we found that the tobacco was all gone, and at that, of course, everything had to stop dead until one of us could go down to the railroad and get some. No tobacco, no work.” She sat down again on the rock ledge and made room for him beside her. “As I say, I hadn’t the remotest idea we were going to find you up here. Harry never gave us the least little hint--which was just like him. What a perfectly glorious view there is from here!” Her enthusiastic exclamation was well warranted. The atmosphere was crystal clear, and across a mountain-studded interval of nearly two hundred miles of sheer distance earth and sky met on the remote horizon formed by the serrated summits of a blue range in eastern Utah. Philip pointed out and named some of the eye-filling grandeurs: White Mountain, Shingle Peak, the rampart buttressings of the White River Plateau, and beyond these the Book or Roan Mountains, too distant to show the striated colorings of their majestic cliffs, and in the southwest, the far-away bulwark of the Uncompahgres.