Crucible."
ZANE GREY.
June, 1915.




THE RAINBOW TRAIL



I. RED LAKE


Shefford halted his tired horse and gazed with slowly realizing eyes.

A league-long slope of sage rolled and billowed down to Red Lake, a
dry red basin, denuded and glistening, a hollow in the desert, a
lonely and desolate door to the vast, wild, and broken upland beyond.

All day Shefford had plodded onward with the clear horizon-line a
thing unattainable; and for days before that he had ridden the wild
bare flats and climbed the rocky desert benches. The great colored
reaches and steps had led endlessly onward and upward through dim and
deceiving distance.

A hundred miles of desert travel, with its mistakes and lessons and
intimations, had not prepared him for what he now saw. He beheld what
seemed a world that knew only magnitude. Wonder and awe fixed his
gaze, and thought remained aloof. Then that dark and unknown northland