Jean MacDonald--Homesteader

South of Elk Creek Valley the foot-hills were less ambitious than those east and north. It was easy to climb their sloping, well-trailed sides on horseback or even afoot, and the view across the wide mesa, blue with sagebrush to the distant mountains blue with August haze, was quite reward enough.

Here was real Western country, almost unhampered by civilization, almost unbroken by that certain sign of progress, the barbed-wire fence. This was in miniature what the pioneers must have gazed upon with weary, dream-filled eyes. Virginia and Donald, who often climbed the hills together for a wild gallop through the unfenced sagebrush, liked always to imagine how those sturdy folk of half a century ago urged their tired oxen up other slopes than these; how they halted on the brow of the foot-hills to rest the patient animals and to fan their hot, dusty faces with their broad-brimmed hats; and how their eager eyes, sweeping over miles of ragged prairie land to the mountains, awful with mystery, saw this great country cleared of sagebrush, intersected with ditches, reclad with homes.

Such had been the history of most of the land above and beyond Elk Creek Valley, and Donald and Virginia were loath to see this one unbroken mesa go. They wanted it as a hunting-ground for prairie chickens and pheasant in the fall, and as a wide, free, unhindered race-course for Pedro and MacDuff. Pedro and MacDuff wanted it, too. They liked to gallop, neck and neck, joyous in the sense of freedom, and in the knowledge that they were giving happiness to their respective riders. For years Donald and Virginia had loved the mesa. They loved it in the spring when the bare patches among the sagebrush grew green and gave birth to hardy spring flowers--buttercups and shooting-stars and spring beauties; they loved it in the long blue days of August and in the shorter golden ones of October; and sometimes they thought they loved it best of all in winter when it lay, silent and very, very wise, beneath the snow.