s of her life. Here seven years
before, when she was twelve, she had made a hard choice to please her
guardian--the old rancher whom she loved and called father, who had
indeed been a father to her. That choice had been to go to school in
Denver. Four years she had lived away from her beloved gray hills and
black mountains. Only once since her return had she climbed to this
height, and that occasion, too, was memorable as an unhappy hour. It
had been three years ago. To-day girlish ordeals and griefs seemed back
in the past: she was a woman at nineteen and face to face with the first
great problem in her life.

The trail came up back of the bluff, through a clump of aspens with
white trunks and yellow fluttering leaves, and led across a level bench
of luxuriant grass and wild flowers to the rocky edge.

She dismounted and threw the bridle. Her mustang, used to being petted,
rubbed his sleek, dark head against her and evidently expected like
demonstration in return, but as none was forthcoming he bent his nose to
the grass and began grazing. The girl's eyes were intent upon some
waving, slender, white-and-blue flowers. They smiled up wanly, like pale
stars, out of the long grass that had a tinge of gold.

"Columbines," she mused, wistfully, as she plucked several of the
flowers and held them up to gaze wonderingly at them, as if to see in
them some revelation of the mystery that shrouded her birth and her
name. Then she stood with dreamy gaze upon the distant ranges.

"Columbine!... So they named me--those miners who found me--a baby--lost
in the woods--asleep among the columbines." She spoke aloud, as if the
sound of her voice might convince her.

So much of the mystery of her had been revealed that day by the man she
had always called father. Vaguely she had always been conscious of some
mystery, something strange about her childhood, some relation never
explained.

"No name but Columbine," she whispered, sadly, and now she understood a
strange longing of her heart.

Scarcely an hour back, as she ran down the Wide porch of White Slides
ranch-house, she had encountered the man who had taken care of her all
her life. He had looked upon her as kindly and fatherly as of old, yet
with a difference. She seemed to see him as old Bill Belllounds, pioneer
and rancher, of huge frame and broad face, hard and scarred and
grizzled, with big eyes of blue fire.

"Collie," the old man had said, "I reckon hyar's news. A letter