le whispers of
hope in the winds that blew there.

She walked aimlessly and yet with a subconscious purpose for ten
minutes or so, and her face was turned directly toward the eastern
hills. She stopped on the edge of the bluff that broke abruptly there,
and sat down and stared at the soft purple of the hills and the soft
green of the nearer slopes, and at the peaceful blue of the sky arched
over it all. Her eyes cleared of their troubled look and grew dreamy.
Her mouth lost its tenseness and softened to a half smile. She was not
looking now into the past that was so full of heartbreak, but into the
future as hope pictured it for her.

She was seeing the Lazy A alive again and all astir with the business
of life; and her father saddling Sioux and riding out to look after the
stock. She was seeing herself riding with him,--or else cooking the
things he liked best for his dinner when he came back hungry. She sat
there for a long, long while and never moved.

A sparrow hawk swooped down quite close to Jean and then shot upward
with a little brown bird in its claws, and startled her out of her
castle building. She felt a hot anger against the hawk, which was like
the sudden grasp of misfortune; and a quick sympathy with the bird,
which was like herself and dad, caught unawares and held helpless. But
she did not move, and the hawk circled and came back on his way to the
nesting-place in the trees along the creek below. He came quite close,
and Jean shot him as he lifted his wings for a higher flight. The hawk
dropped head foremost to the grass and lay there crumpled and quiet.

Jean put back her gun in its holster and went over to where the hawk
lay. The little brown bird fluttered terrifiedly and gave a piteous,
small chirp when her hand closed over it, and then lay quite still in
her cupped palms and blinked up at her.

Jean cuddled it up against her cheek, and talked to it and pitied it
and promised it much in the way of fat little bugs and a warm nest and
her tender regard. For the hawk she had no pity, nor a thought beyond
the one investigative glance she gave its body to make sure that she
had hit it where she meant to hit it. Lite had taught her to shoot
like that,--straight and quick. Lite was a man who trimmed life down to
the essentials, and he had long ago impressed it upon her that if she
could not shoot quickly, and hit where she aimed, there was not much
use in her attempting to shoot at all. Jea