The road was rough and hilly, her new horse and vehicle in keeping with the rudeness of the route--by far the most difficult of her whole journey.

The rare wagon tracks that indicated her road were often scarcely discernible; at times they led her through openings in the half-cleared woods, skirted suspicious morasses, painfully climbed the smooth, domelike hills, or wound along perilous slopes at a dangerous angle.

Twice she had to alight and cling to the sliding wheels on one of those treacherous inclines, or drag them from impending ruts or immovable mire.

In the growing light she could distinguish the distant, low-lying marshes eaten by encroaching sloughs and insidious channels, and beyond them the faint gray waste of the Lower Bay.

A darker peninsula in the marsh she knew to be the extreme boundary of her future home: the Rancho de los Cuervos.