ws were dream or reality. The sun was coming over the Rim Rocks
in a fan-shaped shield of spear shafts; and every single shaft wafted
down thoughts that refused to lie quiet. Shafts that have a trick of
turning your heart into a target can't be shut out by armor proof.

Daylight restored her poise. Her first instinct was to recall the
letter; but Calamity had already set off for the Ridge. The thought
hardly took form, but the shadow haunted her. If It were true, he
would surely never let her work round the ranch houses of the Valley.
Breakfast passed as usual, alone in the big raftered dining room after
the ranch hands had gone, the lame German cook for the camp wagons
hobbling in and out with the dishes. Stage had passed long since and
the mail lay at her place, where the German had spread a white square
above the oilcloth of the long bench table; but letters and papers
remained unopened.

Perhaps, after all, those midnight thoughts had been morbid as midnight
thoughts often are. It might be that the Valley was apart from them,
not they apart from the Valley. Who were the neighbors from whom her
father stood aside? There was the Senator in the white house across
the River. Well, the Senator spent the most of his time in Smelter
City forty miles away, and in Washington. Then, there were the
Williams of the Mission House with their only boy and eighty or a
hundred Indian children; gentlefolk keeping up the amenities of refined
life, spreading the contagion of beautiful example like an irrigation
plot widening slowly over arid sage brush. Surely her father was held
in esteem by them; and they stood for all that was best in the Valley.
Below the ranch houses came what was known as "the English Colony," a
scattering of young bachelors playing at ranching, whose rendezvous was
the pretty Swiss chalet known as "the Rookery," where a wonderful
little young-old lady with red wig and hectic flush dispensed lavish
hospitality and canned music and old port behind the eminent
respectability of a stool-pigeon in the person of a card-loving
husband. The lady's husband called himself "colonel." The Valley
called him one of those "no-good Englishmen"; but the Valley may have
been mistaken; for even to the ranch house had come tales of outraged
honor in the person of the "no-good husband" bursting in on games of
cards with wild charges which only the payment of big money could
suppress--suppress you understand, purely fo