rs, with here and
there lichened rocks showing above the bleached grass. Below the Knoll
was a wide, grassy flat or meadow through which a willow-bordered
stream cut its rugged boulder-strewn bed. Water flowed abundantly at
this season, and the deep washes leading down from the slopes attested
to the fact of cloudbursts and heavy storms. This meadow valley was
dotted with horses and cattle, and meandered away between the timbered
slopes to lose itself in a green curve. A singular feature of this
canyon was that a heavy growth of spruce trees covered the slope facing
northwest; and the opposite slope, exposed to the sun and therefore
less snowbound in winter, held a sparse growth of yellow pines. The
ranch house of Colonel Jorth stood round the rough comer of the largest
of the three canyons, and rather well hidden, it did not obtrude its
rude and broken-down log cabins, its squalid surroundings, its black
mud-holes of corrals upon the beautiful and serene meadow valley.

Ellen Jorth approached her home slowly, with dragging, reluctant steps;
and never before in the three unhappy years of her existence there had
the ranch seemed so bare, so uncared for, so repugnant to her. As she
had seen herself with clarified eyes, so now she saw her home. The
cabin that Ellen lived in with her father was a single-room structure
with one door and no windows. It was about twenty feet square. The
huge, ragged, stone chimney had been built on the outside, with the
wide open fireplace set inside the logs. Smoke was rising from the
chimney. As Ellen halted at the door and began unpacking her burro she
heard the loud, lazy laughter of men. An adjoining log cabin had been
built in two sections, with a wide roofed hall or space between them.
The door in each cabin faced the other, and there was a tall man
standing in one. Ellen recognized Daggs, a neighbor sheepman, who
evidently spent more time with her father than at his own home,
wherever that was. Ellen had never seen it. She heard this man drawl,
"Jorth, heah's your kid come home."

Ellen carried her bed inside the cabin, and unrolled it upon a couch
built of boughs in the far corner. She had forgotten Jean Isbel's
package, and now it fell out under her sight. Quickly she covered it.
A Mexican woman, relative of Antonio, and the only servant about the
place, was squatting Indian fashion before the fireplace, stirring a
pot of beans. She and Ellen did not get along well