ain--for somehow they seemed to
symbolize the spirit of the country--they looked so grim, hardy, and
mysterious with their ugly thorns that seemed to threaten and mock. She
shrank, too, when the buckboard passed the skeleton of a steer, its
bleached bones ghastly in the sunlight, but she smiled when she saw a sea
of soap-weed with yellow blossoms already unfolding, and she looked long
at a mile-wide section of mesquite, dark and inviting in the distance.
She saw a rattler cross the trail in front of the buckboard and draw its
loathsome length into a coil at the base of some crabbed yucca, and
thereafter she made grimaces at each of the ugly plants they passed. It
was new to her, and wonderful. Everything, weird or ugly, possessed a
strange fascination for her, and when they lurched over the crest of a
hill and she saw, looming somberly in the distance in front of her, a
great cottonwood grove, with some mountains behind it, their peaks
gleaming in the shimmering sunlight, thrusting above some fleecy white
clouds against a background of deep-blue sky, her eyes glistened and she
sat very erect, thrilled. It was in such a country that she had longed to
live all the days of her life.

Somehow, it gave her a different viewpoint. The man who had accommodated
them back at the river seemed to fit very well here. The spirit of the
young, unfettered country was in his eyes, in his serene manner; he was
as hardy and rugged as this land from which he had sprung.

* * * * *

When the buckboard came to a halt in the Flying W ranchhouse yard, Ruth
Harkness' first emotion was one of a great happiness that the Harknesses
had always been thrifty and neat, and also that Uncle William had
persisted in these habits. She had greatly feared, for during the last
day of her ride on the train she had passed many ranchhouses and she had
been appalled and depressed by the dilapidated appearance of their
exteriors, and by the general atmosphere of disorder and shiftlessness
that seemed to surround them. So many of them had reminded her of the
dwelling places of careless farmers on her own familiar countryside, and
she had assured herself that if the Flying W were anything like those
others she would immediately try to find a buyer, much as she wished to
stay.

But the first glance at the Flying W convinced her that her fears had
been groundless. The ranchhouse was a big two-story structure built of
he