side of the road, and flung himself in, to swelter in the fierce heat.
He listened and listened for footsteps on the hill, and stared through the bushes till his neck and elbows ached. Then while time dragged by, long as years, the details of the place grew focused out of a blur into painful and weary distinctness. Trees stood out from the vague green wall,—cedars, spruces, firs, alders, and a willow with its leaves blown silver side out in the hot, faint breeze. The wild growth about him resolved itself into bushes of dusty, crumbling raspberries, into yellow St. John's-wort and the sickly pink of fireweed and sheep's-laurel, into withered caraways, into scorched strawberry leaves with wiry runners, old nameless twigs bleached silver gray, the rusty white cockades of queen-of-the-meadow. The road wound up over the little hill to the skyline, a bleak avenue of pebbles and dust between tall weedy mullein stalks and fat little childish fir trees with their pale green tips sticking up knee-high. The very blades of grass became amazingly diverse under his eyes, and ach-
