Aunt Deborah Hunter--Pioneer

Aunt Deborah Hunter was driving from her ranch on Snake Creek to spend the day with her nephew, her grand-niece, and her grand-niece's guests. Clad in her best black silk dress, her black bonnet with the red cherries on the front, and her well-darned black cotton gloves, she was sitting up, very straight and stiff, beside Alec on the front seat. One would have said that her dignity forbade her to rest her shoulders, doubtless tired from the fifteen mile drive. Still, it was not altogether dignity which made Aunt Deborah scorn the support of the cushions which Alec had placed behind her. A great part of it was eagerness.

It had been a long time since she had left her ranch even for a day. No one there could attend to things quite so well as she herself, she always insisted. But now, between shearing and threshing, she had chosen a day upon which to accept Virginia's and her father's oft-repeated invitation, and it was a festive occasion for her. Truth to tell, she needed one day a year, she said, "to meet folks." For the remaining three hundred and sixty-four, the hired man, her two dogs, an occasional visitor, her thoughts, and the mountains were quite enough.

If the infrequent passer-by had paused long enough to look into Aunt Deborah's gray eyes beneath the cherry-trimmed bonnet, he would have seen therein the eagerness that made their owner scorn the sofa-pillows. It sparkled and beamed, now on this side, now on that, as she spied blue gentians blossoming in a hollow, and the gold which was already creeping over the wheat; it glowed as she looked at the mountains, and shone as she drew long breaths of the clear, bracing air; it was the self-same eagerness which lay deep in the gray eyes of her grand-niece Virginia.