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So, in the golden mornings, Nance began to saddle Buckskin and ride away, a snack of bread and bacon tied behind the cantle, to come ambling home at dusk happy, sweet, filled with the joy of life, sometimes a string of speckled beauties dangling at her knee, sometimes empty handed.

Sometimes Bud went with her, but it was not fair to Dan and Molly, the heavy team, to cheat them of their share of rest, since Bud must ride one or the other of them, and so Nance rode for the most part alone.

She “lifted up her eyes to the hills” in all truth and drew from them a very present strength. The dark, blue-green slopes of the tumbling ridges, covered with a tapestry of finely picked out points of pine and fir-trees, filled her with the joy of the nature lover, the awed humility of the humble heart which considers the handiwork of God.

She lay for hours on some bleached log high in a sunny glade, her hands under her fair head, her lips smiling unconsciously, her long blue eyes dreaming into the cloud-flecked heavens, and sometimes she wondered what the future held for her after the fashion of maids since the world began. She recalled the restless wanderings of the family in her early years, remembered vaguely the home and the school in old Missouri, her father’s ceaseless urge for travel. And then had come their journey’s end, here in the austere loneliness of Nameless Valley, where his nomad heart had settled down and had been at home. She thought of these familiar things, and of others not familiar, such as picturing the house she and Bud would one day build on the big meadow, with running water piped from the rushing stream itself, with carpets—Mrs. Allison was already sewing interminable balls of “rags” for the fabric—and with such simple comforts as seemed to her nothing short of luxuries. She knew of a woman in Bement who wove carpets, a Mrs. Porter, at the reasonable price of thirty cents a yard, warp included. The warp should be brown-and-white, she decided—at least she had so decided long back after many conferences with her mother.