ogies into the mountain
corral perched precariously on the hillside. Soon now it would be dusk.
She went back into the cabin and began to prepare supper.

In the rickety stove she made a fire of cottonwood. There was a
business-like efficiency in the way she peeled potatoes, prepared the
venison for the frying-pan, and mixed the biscuit dough.

June Tolliver and her father lived alone on Piceance[1] Creek. Their
nearest neighbor was a trapper on Eighteen-Mile Hill. From one month's
end to another she did not see a woman. The still repression in the
girl's face was due not wholly to loneliness. She lived on the edge of a
secret she intuitively felt was shameful. It colored her thoughts and
feelings, set her apart from the rest of the world. Her physical
reactions were dominated by it. Yet what this secret was she could only
guess at.

A knock sounded on the door.

June brushed back a rebellious lock of hair from her eyes with the wrist
above a flour-whitened hand. "Come in."

A big dark man stood on the threshold. His glance swept the girl,
searched the room, and came back to her.

"Pete Tolliver live here?"

"Yes. He's lookin' after the stock. Be in soon, likely."

The man closed the door. June dragged a chair from a corner and returned
to her cooking.

From his seat the man watched her. His regard was disturbing. It had a
quality of insistence. His eyes were cold yet devouring. They were
possessive, not clear but opaque. They did not look at her as other eyes
did. She felt the blood burning in her cheeks.

Presently, as she passed from the table to the stove to look at the
sputtering venison, she flashed a resentful glance at him. It did not
touch his effrontery.

"You Pete's girl?" he asked.

"Yes."

"You've grown. Knew you when you was learnin' to crawl."

"In Brown's Park?" The words were out before she could stop them.

"You done said it." He smiled, not pleasantly, she thought. "I'm a real
old friend of yore father."

Curiosity touched with apprehension began to stir in her. For those early
years she had only memory to rely upon. Tolliver never referred to them.
On that subject the barriers were up between the two. Fugitive flashes of
that first home came back to June. She remembered a sweet, dark-eyed
woman nuzzling her little body with kisses after the bath, an hour when
that mother wept as though her heart would break and she had put little
baby arms in tight embrace round her neck by way o