noon
`` Let 's get on the ponies ! '' she cried . The snow , that morning , lay in drifts from five to eight inches across the trail , and to the height of several feet up against those rock walls raising , as on vast artificial tables , the higher stretches of the Kiowa country . But by noon the plain was scarcely streaked with white and when the sun set there was nothing to suggest that a snowflake had ever fallen in that sand-strewn world . The interminable reaches , broken only by the level uplands marked from the plain by their perpendicular walls , and the Wichita Mountains , as faint and unsubstantial to the eye as curved images of smoke against the sky -- these dreary monotonies and remotenesses naturally oppress the traveler with a sense of his insignificance . The vast silences , too , of brooding , treeless wastes , sun-baked river-beds , shadowless brown squares standing for miles at a brief height above the shadowless brown floor of the plain -- silences amidst which only the wind finds a voice -- these , too , insist drearily on the nothingness of man . But Wilfred and Lahoma were not thus affected .