nd have a balance sufficient to buy what
clothes they needed, and perhaps pay a doctor if one of them fell ill.
Which frequently happened, since Brit was becoming a prey to rheumatism
that sometimes kept him in bed, and Frank occasionally indulged himself
in a gallon or so of bad whisky and suffered afterwards from a badly
deranged digestion.

Their house was a two-room log cabin, built when logs were easier to get
than lumber. That the cabin contained two rooms was the result of
circumstances rather than design. Brit had hauled from the mountain-side
logs long and logs short, and it had seemed a shame to cut the long ones
any shorter. Later, when the outside world had crept a little closer to
their wilderness--as, go where you will, the outside world has a way of
doing--he had built a lean-to shed against the cabin from what lumber
there was left after building a cowshed against the log barn.

In the early days, Brit had had a wife and two children, but the wife
could not endure the loneliness of the ranch nor the inconvenience of
living in a two-room log cabin. She was continually worrying over
rattlesnakes and diphtheria and pneumonia, and begging Brit to sell out
and live in town. She had married him because he was a cowboy, and
because he was a nimble dancer and rode gallantly with silver-shanked
spurs ajingle on his heels and a snakeskin band around his hat, and
because a ranch away out on Quirt Creek had sounded exactly like a story
in a book.

Adventure, picturesqueness, even romance, are recognized and appreciated
only at a distance. Mrs. Hunter lost the perspective of romance and
adventure, and shed tears because there was sufficient mineral in the
water to yellow her week's washing, and for various other causes which
she had never foreseen and to which she refused to resign herself.

Came a time when she delivered a shrill-voiced, tear-blurred ultimatum
to Brit. Either he must sell out and move to town, or she would take the
children and leave him. Of towns Brit knew nothing except the
post-office, saloon, cheap restaurant side,--and a barber shop where a
fellow could get a shave and hair-cut before he went to see his girl.
Brit could not imagine himself actually _living_, day after day, in a
town. Three or four days had always been his limit. It was in a
restaurant that he had first met his wife. He had stayed three days when
he had meant to finish his business in one, because there was an
awfully nice g