cled bodies fit for the fray.

There was a woman, low-browed, uncombed, harsh of voice and speech and
nature, who drove the four oxen forward over lava rock and rough
prairie and the scanty sage. I might tell you a great deal about
Marthy, who plodded stolidly across the desert and the low-lying hills
along the Blackfoot; and of her weak-souled, shiftless husband whom she
called Jase, when she did not call him worse.

They were the pioneers whose lurching wagon first forded the singing
Wolverine stream just where it greens the tiny valley and then slips
between huge lava-rock ledges to join the larger stream. Jase would
have stopped there and called home the sheltered little green spot in
the gray barrenness. But Marthy went on, up the farther hill and
across the upland, another full day's journey with the sweating oxen.

They camped that night on another little, singing stream, in another
little valley, which was not so level or so green or so wholly pleasing
to the eye. And that night two of the oxen, impelled by a surer
instinct than their human owners, strayed away down a narrow, winding
gorge and so discovered the Cove and feasted upon its rich grasses. It
was Marthy who went after them and who recognized the little, hidden
Eden as the place of her dreams--supposing she ever had dreams. So
Marthy and Jase and the four oxen took possession, and with much labor
and many hard years for the woman, and with the same number of years
and as little labor as he could manage on the man's part, they tamed
the Cove and made it a beauty spot in that wild land. A beauty spot,
though their lives held nothing but treadmill toil and harsh words and
a mental horizon narrowed almost to the limits of the grim, gray, rock
wall that surrounded them.

Another sturdy-souled couple came afterwards and saw the Wolverine and
made for themselves a home upon its banks. And in the rough little log
cabin was born the girl-child I want you to meet; a girl-child when she
should have been a boy to meet her father's need and great desire; a
girl-child whose very name was a compromise between the parents. For
they called her Billy for sake of the boy her father wanted, and Louise
for the girl her mother had longed for to lighten that terrible
loneliness which the far frontier brings to the women who brave its
stern emptiness.

Do you like children? In other words, are you human? Then I want you
to meet Billy Louise when she was ten an