r he becomes restless
and fired with a surplus energy of ambition, or he falls to dreaming
dreams; whatever angle he takes, he changes, imperceptibly perhaps, but
inevitably.

Then the monotony is broken and sometimes with violence. Incident
rushes in upon the heels of incident, and life becomes as tumultuous as
the many moods of nature when it has a wide, open land for a playground.

That is why, perhaps, so much of western life is painted with broad
strokes and raw colors. You are given the crowded action, the
unleashing of emotions and temperaments that have smoldered long under
the blanket of solitary living. You are shown an effect without being
given the cause of that effect. You pronounce the West wild, and you
never think of the long winters that bred in silence and brooding
solitude those storm-periods which seem so primitively savage; of the
days wherein each nature is thrown upon its own resources, with nothing
to feed upon but itself and its own personal interests. And so
characters change, and one wonders why.

There was Billy Louise, with her hands and her mind full of the
problems her father had died still trying to solve. She did not in the
least realize that she was attempting anything out of the ordinary when
she took a half-developed ranch in the middle of a land almost as wild
as it had been when the Indians wandered over it unmolested, a few
cattle and horses and a bundle of debts to make her head swim, and set
herself the problem of increasing the number of cattle and eliminating
the debts, and of wresting prosperity out of a condition of
picturesquely haphazard poverty. She went about it with the pathetic
confidence of youth and ignorance. She rode up and down the canyons
and over the higher, grassier ridges, to watch the cattle on their
summer range and keep them from straying. She went with John Pringle
after posts and helped him fence certain fertile slopes and hollows for
winter grazing. She drove the rickety old mower through the waving
grass along the creek bottom and hummed little, contented tunes while
she watched the grass sway and fall evenly when the sickle shuttled
through. She put on her gymnasium bloomers and drove the hay wagon,
and felt only a pleasurable thrill of excitement when John Pringle
inadvertently pitched an indignant rattlesnake up to her with a forkful
of hay. She killed the snake with her pitchfork and pinched off the
rattles, proud of their size and num