a horse! She thought of an
English girl who had been cut by the good society of Plainville
because she dared to ride like a biped instead of a mermaid. And she
laughed in a wild exultant freedom, while the wind whipped her hair
about her shoulders, and she felt her mount firm beneath her as they
cantered across the brown foothills.

Such hills they were! In her native plains they would have been
mountains of themselves, wonders of Nature to point out to strangers
and to hold in a kind of awe across the country-side, but here they
were foothills, mere fragments dropped from the trowel of the Builder
as He reared the majestic Rockies behind. And though she often in the
early morning, or at sunset, or when the moon was full and white,
feasted her eyes and her soul on the cold splendour of the mighty
range, it was to the warm brown foothills, with their stubbling of
little trees and their solemn warts of grey-green rock, that her
heart turned with something of human affection. At first Uncle Fred,
or Aunt Lilian, or, a little later, one of the two cowboys rode with
her on her expeditions, but her prairie sense of direction quickly
adapted itself to her new surroundings, and she soon learned to keep
a keen eye for the precipitous cut-banks that drop sheer from a level
plain and lie as unsuspected in the saffron sunlight as a coyote
among the ripened willows. There were quicksands, too--spots where
the water sprang from the hillside in a crystal stream and in a few
yards soaked into the kneady earth as in a sponge--but all these
places were fenced; even in Alberta, where cattle grow like rabbits
on the range, the paving of sink-holes with beef steers is an
expensive expedient. So Beulah quickly got her foothill sense, and in
a week was riding, care-free and exultant, across the ranges as her
heart listed or her horse preferred.

One morning, just as the first grey of dawn mottled the darkness of
her chamber, Beulah heard her door open, and through the uncertain
light she discerned Arthurs gently entering with a rifle in his hand.
She sat up, alert, but not afraid; the tingling health in her veins
left no place for fear and suffered no foolishness on the part of her
nervous system.

"What is it, Uncle Fred?" she whispered.

"H-s-h," he cautioned. "You know we have been losing calves with the
timber wolves? Well, there are two of the murderers just across from
the corral. I thought you might want to see them."

In an ins