ould throw her dad a kiss and go galloping off down the
trail,--but when she was quite out of sight around the bend of the
bench-land, she would stop and take the saddle off, and hide it in a
certain clump of wild currant bushes, and continue her journey
bareback. A kit-fox found it one day; that is how the edge of the
cantle came to have that queer, chewed look.

There was an old, black wooden rocker with an oval picture of a ship
under full sail, just where Jean's brown head rested when she leaned
back and stared big-eyed down the coulee to the hills beyond. There
was an old-fashioned work-basket always full of stockings that never
were mended, and a crumpled dresser scarf which Jean had begun to
hemstitch more than a year ago in a brief spasm of domesticity. There
were magazines everywhere; and you may be sure that Jean had read them
all, even to the soap advertisements and the sanitary kitchens and the
vacuum cleaners. There was an old couch with a coarse, Navajo rug
thrown over it, and three or four bright cushions that looked much
used. And there were hair macartas and hackamores, and two pairs of
her father's old spurs, and her father's stock saddle and chaps and
slicker and hat; and a jelly glass half full of rattlesnake rattles,
and her mother's old checked sunbonnet,--the kind with pasteboard
"slats." Half the "slats" were broken. There was a guitar and an old,
old sewing machine with a reloading shotgun outfit spread out upon it.
There was a desk made of boxes, and on the desk lay a shot-loaded quirt
that more than one rebellious cow-horse knew to its sorrow. There was
a rawhide lariat that had parted its strands in a tussle with a
stubborn cow. Jean meant to fix the broken end of the longest piece
and use it for a tie-rope, some day when she had time, and thought of
it.

Somewhere in the desk were verses which Jean had written,--dozens of
them, and not nearly as bad as you might think. Jean laughed at them
after they were written; but she never burned them, and she never spoke
of them to any one but Lite, who listened with fixed attention and a
solemn appreciation when she read them to him.

On the whole, the room was contradictory. But Jean herself was
somewhat contradictory, and the place fitted her. Here was where she
spent those hours when her absence from the Bar Nothing was left
unexplained to any one save Lite. Here was where she drew into her
shell, when her Uncle Carl made her feel m