An eagle soared far beneath her, with the sun shining on his wide-spread wings. A faint roar of running water floated up from the depths, and that was the only sound to disturb the great stillness. To one who had long been used to flat desert, the drab and yellow barrenness, how fertile and beautiful these miles and miles of rolling green! That wild grand wall of rock seemed to shut in the basin, to bar it from what lay beyond. Lastly the loneliness, the solitude, gripped Lucy’s heart.

“We’re on top of Cedar Ridge,” the school teacher was saying. “That mountain wall is called the Red Rim Rock. It’s about thirty miles in a straight line…We’re looking down upon the homes of the backwoodsmen you’ve come to live among.”

Chapter II

The road down into this forest-land contrasted markedly with the ascent on the other side of the ridge; it was no longer steep and dusty; the soil was a sandy loam; the trees that shaded it were larger and more spreading. Birds, rabbits, and squirrels made their presence known.

Some ferns and mosses appeared on the edge of the woods, and pine trees were interspersed among the cedars. Mr. Jenks was nothing if not loquacious, and he varied his talk with snatches of natural history, bits of botany, and considerable forestry. It appeared he had once been a forest ranger in one of the Northern states. Lucy had a natural thirst for knowledge, something that her situation in life had tended to develop.

They descended to a level and followed the road through pine thickets above which an occasional monarch of the forest reared itself commandingly. At length they abruptly drove out of the woods into the first clearing. Lucy’s thought was—how hideous! It was a slash in the forest, a denuded square, with dead trees standing in the brown fields, a rickety fence of crooked poles surrounding a squat log cabin, with open door and dark window suggestive of vacancy.

“Family named Sprall once lived here,” said Mr. Jenks. “Improvident sort of man. He has a large family, more or less addicted to white mule. They moved back in some canyon under the Rim.”

“I’ve heard of this white mule,” replied. Lucy.

“Of course it’s a drink, and I gather that it kicks like a mule. But just what is it?”

“Just plain moonshine whisky without colour. It looks like alcohol. It is alcohol. I once took a taste. Fire and brimstone! I nearly choked to death…The people of this district make it to some extent. They raise a kind of cane from which they distil the liquor. But I’m bound to say that seldom indeed do I see a drunken man.”

Beyond this deserted clearing the road tunnelled into a denser forest where the pungent odour of pine thickly pervaded the atmosphere. The ground was a smooth mat of pine needles, only sparsely grown over with underbrush. Live-oak trees appeared, at first stunted, but gradually developing into rugged members of the forest. Noon found the travellers halted beside the first brook, a tiny trickling rill of clear water. Lucy was grateful for a cool drink. Mr.