this one unbroken mesa
go. They wanted it as a hunting-ground for prairie chickens and pheasant
in the fall, and as a wide, free, unhindered race-course for Pedro and
MacDuff. Pedro and MacDuff wanted it, too. They liked to gallop, neck and
neck, joyous in the sense of freedom, and in the knowledge that they were
giving happiness to their respective riders. For years Donald and Virginia
had loved the mesa. They loved it in the spring when the bare patches
among the sagebrush grew green and gave birth to hardy spring
flowers--buttercups and shooting-stars and spring beauties; they loved it
in the long blue days of August and in the shorter golden ones of October;
and sometimes they thought they loved it best of all in winter when it
lay, silent and very, very wise, beneath the snow.

But it was to be just theirs no longer. The slow, steady tide of oncoming
progress had refused to let it alone. In the spring while Virginia was
still at St. Helen's, Donald, home for the Easter recess, had written her
of two homesteaders' cabins on the mesa toward the southeast, of fences
being built, and of sagebrush rooted up and burned.

It was even less theirs on this August morning, for the cabin of another
homesteader had risen as though by magic in the southwest corner; ten
acres of freshly-plowed land were being warmed by the sun and made ready
for September wheat; and rods of stout barbed-wire tacked to strong,
well-made fence-poles were guarding the future wheat against all
intruders. The cabin, superior in plan and workmanship to that of the
average homesteader, faced the west. It was built of new spruce logs, with
well-filled chinks, and boasted two large windows and a porch, in addition
to its necessary door. Moreover, an outside stone chimney betokened a
fire-place--an untold luxury to a homesteader. A second wire fence, set
at some three rods from the cabin, inclosed it on all sides, and protected
a small vegetable garden and a few fruit trees, which the owner had
already planted.

It was a good quarter section upon which this ambitious homesteader had
filed. On the south the mesa mounted into the higher hills, and this claim
included timber; the land already plowed showed the soil to be black and
fertile; and a creek, tumbling from the mountains and hurrying by just
back of the cabin, promised plenty of water, even in a thirsty season.
With a substantial new cabin, three cows and a horse, some hens and two
collie dogs, a