rowing
more chill, and northward the sky was streaked in long, slanting lines
with a downfall that was advancing toward the farm. She gave no thought
to deferring her trip, however, but sprang into the saddle, and instead
of taking the road leading through the corn-shocks, started across the
fields toward the carnelian bluff.

To her dismay, her short cut resulted only in a loss of time. When she
passed through the cottonwoods to the barley-field beyond, the ground,
still soaked from the recent rain, became so soft that the sorrel sank
to his knees at every step. He began to plunge excitedly, and she guided
him to the left, away from the timothy meadow, to a firmer foothold on
the edge of the corn-field. It brought her out upon the prairie at the
western base of the hill.

As she crossed the southern slope, setting her horse into a run with her
whip, she chanced to glance up toward the summit, and her eyes met an
unfamiliar object. The next moment, despite her solicitude for her
mother, the oncoming storm and the long road ahead, she reined him in so
abruptly that he sat back upon his haunches, and then urged him up the
incline to where, in place of the usual pile of stones, was a low, dark
mound of earth with a pipestone cross at its head.

Halted beside the mound, her curiosity changed to sudden awe; for,
leaning from her horse, she read aloud a word that imparted painful
knowledge carefully kept from her for almost fourteen years,--a word
that was chiseled deep into the polished face of the cross:

FATHER

Looking down thus, for the first time, at the uncovered grave, no
feeling of grief succeeded her surprise and wonder. But instantly the
thought came that it was here, in happy ignorance of the meaning of the
pile, that every spring and summer she had sat to watch the big brothers
at work in the fields, the gophers, the birds, the herd in the slough
below; to think over her baby problems and sorrows; or to build castles
from a beloved book. She read the chiseled word again, softly and
reverently, then backed the sorrel away and once more rode on rapidly,
making for the railroad and sitting her horse with the tense erectness
of a trooper on parade.

All at once, a little way out on the prairie, a terror seized her, and
she began to lash the sorrel with all her might. The black hillock
behind, with its graven head-mark, had borne to her heart a new fear
that perhaps her mother, too, wo