hough we were Augustus
entering Rome! Best of all, Mr. Hunter says he is going to send the
skin to you, Dad--it's all black and curly--for the library floor.
Isn't it splendid of him?

"'I simply must run and wash, and rustle a clean middy somewhere.

"'Loads of love,

"'PRISCILLA.

"'P. S.--Mother, dear, I guess I'll have to have still another
Thought Book. I never in my life had so many thoughts. They come
crowding in--one on top of the other--but many of them are the kind
you can't very well express.

"'P. A. W.

"'P. P. S.--I can shoot a bottle all to pieces at thirty yards. Don't
you call that pretty good?

"'P. A. W.'"

"Rustle?" soliloquized Mrs. Winthrop, as Priscilla's father folded the
letter. "I've never heard that word before in such a connection, and
she's used it twice!"

"Well," announced Alden Winthrop decidedly, "I've never had much use for
Thought Books, but I believe I could write down a thought or two myself if
I'd trapped a Rocky Mountain bear!"

CHAPTER V

JEAN MACDONALD--HOMESTEADER

South of Elk Creek Valley the foot-hills were less ambitious than those
east and north. It was easy to climb their sloping, well-trailed sides on
horseback or even afoot, and the view across the wide mesa, blue with
sagebrush to the distant mountains blue with August haze, was quite reward
enough.

Here was real Western country, almost unhampered by civilization, almost
unbroken by that certain sign of progress, the barbed-wire fence. This was
in miniature what the pioneers must have gazed upon with weary,
dream-filled eyes. Virginia and Donald, who often climbed the hills
together for a wild gallop through the unfenced sagebrush, liked always to
imagine how those sturdy folk of half a century ago urged their tired oxen
up other slopes than these; how they halted on the brow of the foot-hills
to rest the patient animals and to fan their hot, dusty faces with their
broad-brimmed hats; and how their eager eyes, sweeping over miles of
ragged prairie land to the mountains, awful with mystery, saw this great
country cleared of sagebrush, intersected with ditches, reclad with
homes.

Such had been the history of most of the land above and beyond Elk Creek
Valley, and Donald and Virginia were loath to see