nd to the remembrance that she was now facing a new life. As she lay
there thinking, her eyes troubled but tearless, far away on the
sun-kissed uplands Hampton was spurring forward his horse, already
beginning to exhibit signs of weariness. Bent slightly over the saddle
pommel, his eyes upon these snow-capped peaks still showing blurred and
distant, he rode steadily on, the only moving object amid all that
wide, desolate landscape.

_PART II_

WHAT OCCURRED IN GLENCAID

CHAPTER I

THE ARRIVAL OF MISS SPENCER

There was a considerable period when events of importance in Glencaid's
history were viewed against the background of the opening of its first
school. This was not entirely on account of the deep interest
manifested in the cause of higher education by the residents, but owing
rather to the personality of the pioneer school-teacher, and the deep,
abiding impress which she made upon the community.

Miss Phoebe Spencer came direct to Glencaid from the far East, her
starting-point some little junction place back in Vermont, although she
proudly named Boston as her home, having once visited in that
metropolis for three delicious weeks. She was of an ardent,
impressionable nature. Her mind was nurtured upon Eastern conceptions
of our common country, her imagination aglow with weird tales of the
frontier, and her bright eyes perceived the vivid coloring of romance
in each prosaic object west of the tawny Missouri. All appeared so
different from that established life to which she had grown
accustomed,--the people, the country, the picturesque language,--while
her brain so teemed with lurid pictures of border experiences and
heroes as to reveal romantic possibilities everywhere. The vast,
mysterious West, with its seemingly boundless prairies, grand, solemn
mountains, and frankly spoken men peculiarly attired and everywhere
bearing the inevitable "gun," was to her a newly discovered world. She
could scarcely comprehend its reality. As the apparently illimitable
plains, barren, desolate, awe-inspiring, rolled away behind, mile after
mile, like a vast sea, and left a measureless expanse of grim desert
between her and the old life, her unfettered imagination seemed to
expand with the fathomless blue of the Western sky. As her eager eyes
traced the serrated peaks of a snow-clad mountain range, her heart
throbbed with anticipation of wonders yet to come. Homesickness was a
thing undreamed of; her activ