him, appreciating her firm, easy seat in the stock saddle, her
management of Beaver Boy, now eager to prove his prowess against the
buckskin's. He noted the rich colour lying beneath the tan of the
smooth cheeks, the rounded brown throat, the poise of the lithe, pliant
body and the watchful tension of the strong arms and shoulders as the
big bay fought hard for his head and a brief freedom to use his full
strength and speed in one mad heartbreaking burst. But most of all he
noted and was attracted by the level, direct, fearless stare beneath
the slightly drawn brows into the distances.

A brown girl in a brown land! It came to Casey Dunne, who was
imaginative within the strict seclusion of his inner self, that she
typified their land, the West, in youth, in fearlessness, in
potentialities yet lying fallow, unawakened, in fruitfulness to come.
What of the vagrant touch of the woman, the gold of the day, the clean,
dry air and the glory of motion, the chord of romance within him
vibrated and began to sing.

It invested her momentarily with a new quality, a new personality. She
was no longer the Sheila McCrae he had known so well. She was the
Spirit of the Land, a part of it--she was Sheila of the West; and her
heritage was plain and mountain, gleaming lake and rushing river, its
miles numbered by thousands, its acres by millions--a land for a new
nation.

How many Sheilas, he wondered--young, strong, clean of blood, straight
of limb--had ridden since the beginning of time into the new lands, and
borne their part in peopling them. Fifty years before, her prototypes
had ridden beside the line of crawling, creaking prairie schooners
across the great plains toward the setting sun; little more than fifty
years before that they had ridden down through the notches of the blue
Alleghenies into the promised land of Kain-tuck-ee, the Dark and Bloody
Ground, beside buckskin-clad, deckard-armed frontiersmen. Perhaps,
centuries before that, her ancestresses had ridden with burly,
skin-clad warriors out of the great forests of northern Europe down to
the pleasant weaker south. But surely she was the peer of any of
them--this woman riding knee to knee with him, the sloping sun in her
clear, brown eyes, and the warm, sweet winds kissing her cheeks!

And so Casey Dunne dreamed as he rode--dreamed as he had not dreamed
waking since the days when, a little boy, he had lain on warm sands
beside a blue inland sea on summer's afternoons an