nks, and she stood for a minute looking at it as if it were a
person. Her Stetson hat tilted a little to one side, her hair fluffed
loosely at the sides, leaving her neck daintily slender where it showed
above the turned-back collar of her gray sweater; her shoulders square
and capable and yet not too heavy, and the slim contour of her figure
reaching down to the ground. She studied it abstractedly, as she would
study herself in her mirror, conscious of the individuality, its
likeness to herself.

"I don't know what kind of a mess you'll make of it," she said to her
shadow, "but you're going to tackle it, just the same. You can't do a
thing till you get some money."

She turned then and went thoughtfully up to the house and into her
room, which had as yet been left undisturbed behind the bars she had
placed against idle invasion.

The moon shone full into the window that faced the coulee, and she sat
down in the old, black wooden rocker and gazed out upon the familiar,
open stretch of sand and scant grass-growth that lay between the house
and the corrals. She turned her eyes to the familiar bold outline of
the bluff that swung round in a crude oval to the point where the trail
turned into the coulee from the southwest. Half-way between the base
and the ragged skyline, the boulder that looked like an elephant's head
stood out, white of profile, hooded with black shade. Beyond was the
fat shelf of ledge that had a small cave beneath, where she had once
found a nest full of little, hungry birds and upon the slope beneath
the telltale, scattered wing-feathers, to show what fate had fallen
upon the mother. Those birds had died also, and she had wept and given
them Christian burial, and had afterwards spent hours every day with
her little rifle hunting the destroyer of that small home. She
remembered the incident now as a small thread in the memory-pattern she
was weaving.

While the shadows shortened as the moon swung high, she sat and looked
out upon the coulee and the bluff that sheltered it, and she saw the
things that were blended cunningly with the things that were not.
After a long while her hands unclasped themselves from behind her head
and dropped numbly to her lap. She sighed and moved stiffly, and knew
that she was tired and that she must get some sleep, because she could
not sit down in one spot and think her way through the problems she had
taken it upon herself to solve. So she got up and crept un