And before long they were worse, for the increasing darkness blotted out the landmarks she was using as guides and she was lost among the hill waves that rolled one after another across the range. Still she did not give way, telling herself that it would be better after the moon was up. She could then tell north from south, and so have a line by which to travel. But when at length the stars came out, thousands upon thousands of them, and looked down on a land magically flooded with chill moonlight, the girl found that the transformation of Wyoming into this sense of silvery loveliness had toned the distant mountain line to an indefinite haze that made it impossible for her to distinguish one peak from another. She wandered for hours, hungry and tired and frightened, though this last she would not confess. “There’s nothing to be afraid of,” she told herself over and over. “Even if I have to stay out all night it will do me no harm. There’s no need to be a baby about it.” But try to evade it as she would, there was something in the loneliness of this limitless stretch of hilltop that got on her nerves. The very shadows cast by the moonshine seemed too fantastic for reality. Something eerie and unearthly hovered over it all, and before she knew it a sob choked up her throat. Vague fancies filtered through her mind, weird imaginings born of the night in a mind that had been swept from the moorings of reason. So that with no sensible surprise there came to her in that moonlit sea of desert the sound of a voice a clear sweet tenor swelling bravely in song with the very ecstacy of pathos. It was the prison song from “Il Trovatore,” and the desolation of its lifted appeal went to the heart like water to the roots of flowers. Ah! I have sigh’d to rest me. Deep in the quiet grave. The girl’s sob caught in her breast, stilled with the awe of that heavenly music. So for an instant she waited before it was borne in on her that the voice was a human one, and that the heaven from which it descended was the hilltop above her. A wild laugh, followed by an oath, cut the dying echoes of the song. She could hear the swish of a quirt falling again and again, and the sound of trampling hoofs thudding on the hard, sun-cracked ground. Startled, she sprang to her feet, and saw silhouetted against the skyline a horse and his rider fighting for mastery.