The morning dawned with the sky a molten green and gold. The mountain peak and the high ridges were a beautiful pink, and below them lay the green and blue of the meadow like a velvet carpet.
“Wonderful!” breathed the girls in chorus.
“Could anything be more beautiful?” murmured Grace.
“This is worth all the hardships we have endured,” declared Elfreda.
The Overlanders continued to admire the scene until breakfast was ready. Immediately after the meal the journey was resumed, each one eager to reach the pink snows above that held so great a fascination for all. They came to the snow line late in the day. The ponies were left in charge of Woo Smith to remain until the party returned from the high peak of the Sierras, which was now their immediate objective.
Now that they were close to it, they discovered that the snow really was pink. No one seemed able to explain this mystery until Tom announced it as his opinion that the pink shade was due to a tiny bright red flower whose petals were found imbedded in the snow. Stacy scooped up a handful of snow and tasted it, and then made a wry face.
“It tastes like turpentine,” he declared.
The Overland Riders danced and capered about in the snow like school children, and tried to snowball each other, but found the snow so crumbly that it could not be rolled into balls. This they overcame by wetting handfuls of snow from their canteens, and then, ere they even thought of making camp, they had a merry snowballing battle thousands of feet above sea level. They battled until their breaths gave out in the rarefied air—threw snowballs at each other until almost exhausted.
“Never mind. Don’t wolly till to-mollow,” comforted Stacy Brown.
With the coming of night a chill settled over the mountain, beside which the previous nights were almost sultry, and a damp, gray cloud hid the lower reaches of the peaks like a great gray blanket. The Overlanders were glad that they were above rather than below that cloud, and they hugged their cook fire, though it was far from being a roaring one, for they did not have fuel to waste.