The Joy of Anticipation

Elk Creek Valley was a blue and golden place that mid-summer morning in the Big Horn Country. It seemed like a joyous secret tucked away among the mountains, whose hazy, far-away summits were as blue as the sky above them. The lower ranges, too, were blue from purple haze and gray-green sagebrush, while the bare, brown foot-hills tumbling about their feet were golden in the sunlight. Blue lupines and great spikes of mountain larkspur made of the Valley itself a garden which sloped gently to the creek, and lost itself in a maze of quaking-asps and cottonwoods. As for the creek waters, they ceased their tumultuous haste upon nearing the garden, and were content to move slowly so that they might catch and hold the sunlight in their amber depths. Beyond the creek, and through a gap in the foot-hills, the prairie stretched for miles--blue and green with oats and wheat and alfalfa. Now and then a mountain bluebird was lost to sight among the larkspur, and always a cloud of tiny blue butterflies circled above the creek.

Two pair of delighted eyes--one gray and the other blue--gazed upon the loveliness of everything as their owners watered a team of big bay horses at the ford. The gray eyes belonged to a girl of seventeen--a girl with golden-brown hair and cheeks glowing red through the tan of her eager, thoughtful face. She was radiant with happiness. It beamed from her eyes and lurked about the corners of her mouth. She seemed too excited to sit still. Now her gray eyes swept the prairie stretches, now scanned the mountains, now peered up the creek beneath the over-hanging trees. She was talking in short, eager sentences to her companion--the owner of the blue eyes. He was a tall, clean, robust lad--a year older than she.