ly had just completed her grammar course at the little Bear Forks'
school-house where Anne Stewart had taught two years previous to this
summer. Polly had never been elsewhere than at Oak Creek and now she
yearned to attend High School in Denver.

Anne Stewart lived in Denver, and for the past year had been tutoring
Eleanor Maynard, while the girl and her older sister Barbara boarded
with Mrs. Stewart. The Maynard girls were from Chicago, but Eleanor, who
was fourteen, was very delicate, so the doctor had recommended a high
altitude for her.

Anne Stewart was helping her brother Paul through a college in Chicago,
and during her visit to him, at the end of his first year, she met his
friends--John Brewster who was Polly's older brother; Tom Latimer a
promising young engineer from New York; and Pete Maynard who was a
brother to Eleanor and Barbara. It was through this means that the
Maynards heard of the Stewarts' home in Denver, and anxiously begged
Anne to take the two girls into her home circle. As the salary offered
for this privilege was so munificent, the young teacher eagerly
accepted, and then found her youngest charge a lovable and merry girl.

The two Chicago girls had returned home for a few months, but Eleanor
could not stand the high winds and stubborn climate of Chicago, so the
doctor again ordered her to spend a summer in the mountains of Colorado.
In distraction, Mr. Maynard begged Anne Stewart to arrange everything,
and thus it was that these two society girls came, with Anne, to board
with Polly's family at Pebbly Pit ranch.

The Brewsters were considered very wealthy in land and cattle, to say
nothing of the Rainbow Cliffs, for which a New York financier had
offered them half a million dollars for part interest in mining them.
But Sam Brewster could afford to refuse such destruction to his
beautiful estate. Polly had never had city-made clothing, nor had she
the slightest idea of city-ways, until the Maynard girls' advent to
Pebbly Pit. But she had had years of thrilling experiences to her
credit--experiences with wild-life of all kinds, of mountain-climbing,
of adventures of other sorts, to say nothing about knowledge of farming
and domestic animals. This outdoor life gave her abundant health,
strength, and the beauty of a fine complexion, clear eyes, luxuriant
glossy hair, and a graceful well-formed figure that was all the more
attractive because of the charms her adolescence promised.

That very