en came before him,
the preliminary was ordered and McCloud's findings were approved.
McCloud himself was soon afterward engrossed in the problems of
operating the mountain division; but the dream of his life was to
build the Crawling Stone Line with a maximum grade of eight tenths
through The Box.

The prettiest stretch of Crawling Stone Valley lies within twenty
miles of Medicine Bend. There it lies widest, and has the pick of
water and grass between Medicine Bend and the Mission Mountains.
Cattlemen went into the Crawling Stone country before the Indians had
wholly left it. The first house in the valley was the Stone Ranch,
built by Richard Dunning, and it still stands overlooking the town of
Dunning at the junction of the Frenchman Creek with the Crawling
Stone. The Frenchman is fed by unfailing springs, and when by summer
sun and wind every smaller stream in the middle basin has been licked
dry, the Frenchman runs cold and swift between its russet hills.
Richard Dunning, being on the border of the Indian country, built for
his ranch-house a rambling stone fortress. He had chosen, it afterward
proved, the choice spot in the valley, and he stocked it with cattle
when yearlings could be picked up in Medicine Bend at ten dollars a
head. He got together a great body of valley land when it could be had
for the asking, and became the rich man of the Long Range.

The Dunnings were Kentuckians. Richard was a bridge engineer and
builder, and under Brodie built some of the first bridges on the
mountain division, notably the great wooden bridge at Smoky Creek.
Richard brought out his nephew, Lance Dunning. He taught Lance
bridge-building, and Murray Sinclair, who began as a cowboy on the
Stone Ranch, learned bridge-building from Richard Dunning. The
Dunnings both came West, though at different times, as young men and
unmarried, and, as far as Western women were concerned, might always
have remained so. But a Kentucky cousin, Betty, one of the Fairfield
Dunnings, related to Richard within the sixth or eighth degree, came
to the mountains for her health. Betty's mother had brought Richard up
as a boy, and Betty, when he left Fairfield, was a baby. But Dick--as
they knew him at home--and the mother wrote back and forth, and he
persuaded her to send Betty out for a trip, promising he would send
her back in a year a well woman.

Betty came with only her colored maid, old Puss Dunning, who had taken
her from the nurse's arms whe