“Most of us are fans--we admire and worship and gloat over the success of the few, particularly if it is designed for our entertainment, but never make an effort at being anything ourselves. Oh, I’m sick of shouting from the grandstand, Doctor! I want to do something. I want to be one of the few who make the world go round for the others!” “Leave the grandstand, then,” said the doctor softly, “and come down on the diamond with me.” Charmian caught her breath at the suddenness of it. She had not suspected that she was leading herself into a trap. And she had given herself to Andy! She had let him fondle her, had told him that she loved him, with her lips pressed to his. “I--I haven’t finished thinking about it,” she said hurriedly, and hastened off to her blankets. For an hour she lay looking up at the black sky and the tracery of pine branches against it, thinking, thinking, groping patiently but fruitlessly. Next morning at an early hour they climbed the hill again, crossed the wooded plateau, came upon the thinning trees and the encroaching brush. That afternoon they left all traces of the forest behind them, and faced a desolate sweep of chaparral, stretching away as far as the eye could see, hemmed in on the south by snowy peaks barely outlined against the paleness of the sky. And somewhere in the midst of that seemingly unbroken sea of hoary grey and antique gold the undiscovered Valley of Arcana lay in hiding. CHAPTER XVII BEAR PASS YEARS beyond conjecture had passed since a great forest fire had swept across the waste of chaparral which Charmian and Doctor Shonto looked upon. Probably never before or since in the history of the California forests had such a far-reaching fire ravaged the peaks and valleys. A mighty forest had stood there then, to be laid low by the consuming flames. In its place had come the comparatively rapid growing chaparral, claiming the land to the exclusion of all other vegetation. Here and there a lone pine stood erect and disdainful above the twelve-foot brush, and here and there on the ground under the bushes lay down trees, ancient corpses that had disintegrated to corklike particles and powder, mere shadows of logs that were ready to crumble when a boot toe touched them. The chaparral was compromised of buckthorn bushes, interspersed with manzanita. The buckthorn bushes formed what is known as locked chaparral--which means that their prickly upper branches are twined and intertwined until they form a solid mat, more impenetrable than a hedge. So compact was this mat that little sun trickled through to the earth, and as a consequence of this not a blade of grass could live under the dense canopy. But even where a single chaparral bush grows in the open no grass will be found within a radius of ten feet on all sides of it. It claims the land, selfishly sucks all the nutriment from the soil, and will share existence with no other plant.