@Shefford halted his tired horse and gazed around with slowly realizing eyes.
A long slope of sage rolled down to Red Lake, a dry red basin, bare and shiny. It was a hollow sunk in the desert, a bleak and lonely door to the vast, wild, and broken hills beyond.
For days now, Shefford had ridden the wild, bare flats and climbed the rocky desert benches. He had plodded steadily onward, but he always felt the horizon was out of reach in the distance.
But a hundred miles of desert travel, with its mistakes and lessons and hints of what lay beyond had not prepared him for what he saw now. Before him lay a world that seemed built entirely of greatness. Shefford looked at it with awe and wonder, his mind detached from any conscious thought.
