Inez went on.  “Peter Knight’s been all over the United States and he says there’s no place passes it in beauty.  Sometimes when I see the valley looking like it does to-night, I cry.  Doug, you are more promising than these other kids.  When you ride round on the range try to keep your mind a little bit off cattle and horses and women and keep it on that line of the Forest Reserve the way it looks to-night.  Or the way this yellow wall looks in the snow and the sunrise on it.  And then, when you get that habit, tell Judith about it and get her to thinking the same way.  Beauty can’t live on rot, Douglas.  I know that now.  I don’t care what Charleton quotes.”

“Inez,” asked Douglas huskily, “why don’t you burn that old cabin up?”

“It’s too late,” replied Inez shortly; and she turned on her heel and left him.

Douglas rode thoughtfully along the home trail.  He was angry with Peter and sorry for Inez, and he missed his mother as he never had missed her before.  He had been only a baby at the time of her death.  This was the first time that he had been told of the type of woman she was though he had heard much of his mother’s father, old Bill Douglas.  He went to bed that night with an entirely new set of thoughts.

The heaviest ranch work of the year was now at hand.  The hay harvest was begun.  From dawn until dusk, Doug and Judith worked in the fields and tumbled to bed at night as soon as the chores were done.  They had many opportunities during the day for conversations, however, for after the hay was raked, Douglas and Judith drove one rick team, John and old Johnny Brown the other.  Heavy work it certainly was, but work of what fragrance, under skies of what an unbelievably deep blue, in air of what tingling warmth and clearness!  What unthinkable distances were glimpsed from the wild hay patch on the flank of Dead Line Peak!  It seemed to Douglas, lying at length, chin elbow-supported, on the top of the last load, which Judith had insisted on driving, that he never before had sensed the beauty of the haying season in Lost Chief Valley.  And again he seemed to see Inez’s tragic eyes, which had shed tears over the beauty of these very hills.  He turned the memory of those eyes over in his mind with a memory of the sardonic twist of Charleton’s mouth as he had uttered his philosophy of life, and suddenly Doug wished that he dared to talk to his father about these things.  He had asked John about the Emerson letters but John professed never to have heard of them.  And Douglas fell to wondering about his grandfather’s dream for Lost Chief.

They were pulling through the swamp road above the home corral.  It was heavy going and when they reached the shade of a little clump of blue spruce and aspen, Judith pulled the team up for a short rest.  She pushed her broad straw hat back from her face and half turned to look at Douglas.

“Have you seen that new litter of pups of Sister’s?” she asked Douglas.