ng the cattle and the
long distance from market absorbed a great bulk of the profits
needlessly. He set about with the original plan, therefore, of fencing
his forty thousand acres with wire, thus erasing at one bold stroke the
cost of hiring men to guard his herds.

A fence in the Bad Lands was unknown outside a corral in those days.
When carloads of barbed wire and posts began to arrive at Glendora men
came riding in for miles to satisfy themselves that the rumors were
founded; when Philbrook hired men to build the fence, and operations
were begun, murmurs and threats against the unwelcome innovation were
heard. Philbrook pushed the work to conclusion, unmindful of the
threats, moved now by the intention of founding a great, baronial estate
in that bleak land. His further plan of profit and consequence was to
establish a packing-house at Glendora, where his herds could be
slaughtered and dressed and shipped neat to market, at once assuring him
a double profit and reduced expense. But that was one phase of his dream
that never hardened into the reality of machinery and bricks.

While the long lines of fence were going up, carpenters were at work
building a fit seat for Philbrook's baronial aims. The point he chose
for his home site was the top of a bare plateau overlooking the river,
the face of it gray, crumbling shale, rising three hundred feet in
abrupt slope from the water's edge. At great labor and expense Philbrook
built a road between Glendora and this place, and carried water in pipes
from the river to irrigate the grass, trees, shrubs and blooming plants
alien to that country which he planted to break the bleakness of it and
make a setting for his costly home.

Here on this jutting shoulder of the cold, unfriendly upland, a house
rose which was the wonder of all who beheld it as they rode the wild
distances and viewed it from afar. It seemed a mansion to them, its
walls gleaming white, its roof green as the hope in its builder's
breast. It was a large house, and seemed larger for its prominence
against the sky, built in the shape of a T, with wide porches in the
angles. And to this place, upon which he had lavished what remained of
his fortune, Philbrook brought his wife and little daughter, as strange
to their surroundings as the delicate flowers which pined and drooped in
that unfriendly soil.

Immediately upon completion of his fences he had imported well-bred
cattle and set them grazing within his conf