the stream
from far up the gorge to water meadow and orchard, Blue halted and cast
a look of disapproval back at his rider. Billy Louise stopped singing
and laughed at him.

"I guess you can go where a cow can go, you silly thing. Mud's a heap
easier than lava rock, if you only knew it, Blue. Get along with you."

Blue lowered his head, snuffed suspiciously at the water-filled tracks,
and would have turned back. Mud he despised instinctively, since he
had nearly mired on the creek bank when he was a sucking colt.

"Blue! Get across that ditch, or I'll beat you to death!" The voice
of Billy Louise was soft with a caressing note at the end, so that the
threat did not sound very savage, after all. She sniffed at the branch
of cherry blossoms and reined the horse back to face the ditch. And
Blue, who had a will of his own, snorted and wheeled, this time in
frank rebellion against her command.

"Oh, will you? Well, you'll cross that ditch, you know, sooner or
later--so you might just as well--" Blue reared and whirled again,
plunging two rods back toward the cherry thicket.

Billy Louise set her teeth against her lower lip, slid her rawhide
quirt from slim wrist to firm hand-grip, and proceeded to match Blue's
obstinacy with her own; and since the obstinacy of Billy Louise was
stronger and finer and backed by a surer understanding of the thing she
was fighting against, Blue presently lifted himself, leaped the ditch
in one clean jump, and snorted when he sank nearly to his knees in the
soft, black soil beyond.

From there to the pink drift of peach bloom against the dull brown of
the bluff, Blue galloped angrily, leaving deep, black prints in the
soft green of the meadow. So they came headlong upon Marthy, just as
she was knocking the yellow clay of the grave from her irrigating
shovel against the pole fence of her pig-pen.

"Why, Marthy!" Once before in her life Billy Louise had seen Marthy's
chin quivering like that, and big, slow tears sliding down the network
of lines on Marthy's leathery cheeks. With a painful slump her spirits
went heavy with her sympathy. "Marthy!"

She knew without a word of explanation just what had happened. From
Marthy's bent shoulders she knew, and from her tear-stained face, and
from the yellow soil clinging still to the shovel in her hand. The
wide eyes of Billy Louise sent seeking glances up the slope where the
soil was yellow; went to the long, raw ridge under the wa