ore than usually an
interloper; or when her Aunt Ella's burden of complaints and worry and
headaches grew just a little too much for Jean.

She never opened the door into the kitchen. There was another just
beyond the sewing-machine, that gave an intimate look into the face of
the bluff which formed that side of the coulee wall. There were
hollyhocks along the path that led to this door, and stunted rosebushes
which were kept alive with much mysterious assistance in the way of
water and cultivation. There was a little spring just under the foot
of the bluff, where the trail began to climb; and some young alders
made a shady nook there which Jean found pleasant on a hot day.

The rest of the house might be rat-ridden and desolate. The coulee
might wear always the look of emptiness; but here, under the bluff by
the spring, and in the room Jean called hers, one felt the air of
occupancy that gave the lie to all around it.

When she rode around the bold, out-thrust shoulder of the hill which
formed the western rim of the coulee, and went loping up the trail to
where the barbed-wire gate stopped her, you would have said that Jean
had not a trouble to call her own. She wore her old gray Stetson
pretty well over one eye because of the sun-glare, and she was riding
on one stirrup and letting the other foot swing free, and she was
whirling her quirt round and round, cartwheel fashion, and whistling an
air that every one knows,--and putting in certain complicated
variations of her own.

At the gate she dismounted without ever missing a note, gave the warped
stake a certain twist and jerk which loosened the wire loop so that she
could slip it easily over the post, passed through and dragged the gate
with her, dropping it flat upon the ground beside the trail. There was
no stock anywhere in the coulee, and she would save a little trouble by
leaving the gate open until she came out on her way home. She stepped
aside to inspect the meadow lark's nest cunningly hidden under a wild
rosebush, and then mounted and went on to the stable, still whistling
carelessly.

She turned Pard into the shed where she invariably left him when she
came to the Lazy A, and went on up the grass-grown path to the house.
She had the preoccupied air of one who meditates deeply upon things
apart; as a matter of fact, she had glanced down the coulee to its
wide-open mouth, and had thrilled briefly at the wordless beauty of the
green spread of the