Jim’s foster-parents were, in truth, glad to part with him.  From his earliest babyhood he had been known as a “limb of Satan.”  He was an Ishmael by every instinct of his being.  And Mrs. Warren Rodney, nee Tumlin, felt that in dealing with him, in her capacity of step-mother, she daily expiated any offence that she might have done to his mother.

Sally grew slatternly with increasing maternity.  She spent her time in a rocking-chair, dipping snuff—­a consolation imported from her former home—­ and lamenting the bad marriage she had made.  Rodney ascribed his ill-fortune to unjust neighborly criticism.  He farmed a little, he raised a little stock, and he drank a great deal of whiskey.  Sally hated the Black Hill country.  She felt that it knew too much about her.  The neighborly inquisition had fallen like a blight on the family fortunes.  A vague migratory impulse was on her.  She wanted to go somewhere and begin all over again.  By dint of persistent nagging she persuaded her husband to move to Wyoming, then in the golden age of the cattle industry.  Those were days when steers, to speak in the cow language, had “jumped to seventy-five.”  The wilderness grew light-headed with prosperity.  Wonderful are the tales still told about those fat years in cattle-land.  It was in those halcyon days of the Cheyenne Club that the members rode from the range, white with the dust of the desert, to enjoy greater luxuries than those procurable at their clubs in New York.

Nor was it all feasting and merrymaking.  A heroic band it was that battled with the wilderness, riding the range with heat and cold, starvation and death, and making small pin-pricks in that empty blotch of the United States map that is marked “Great Alkali Desert” blossom into settlements.  When the last word has been said about the pioneers of these United States, let the cow-boy be remembered in the universal toast, that bronzed son of the saddle who lived his little day bravely and merrily, and whose real heroism is too often forgotten in the glamour of his own picturesqueness.

Judith was ten years old when her father, his wife, and their children moved from Dakota—­they were not so particular about North and South Dakota, in those days—­to take up a claim on Sweetwater, Wyoming.  Judith gave scant promise of the beauty that in later life became at once her dower and her misfortune, that which was as likely to bring wretchedness as happiness.  In Wyoming she was destined to find an old friend, Mrs. Atkins, who, as the bride of the young lieutenant, had been present at the marriage of Sally Tumlin and Warren Rodney, and who had always felt a wholly unreasonable sense of guilt at witnessing the ceremony and contributing a lace handkerchief to the bride.  Her husband, now Major Atkins, was stationed at Fort Washakie, Wyoming.  Mrs. Atkins happening again on the Rodney family, and her husband having increased and multiplied his army pay many times over by a successful venture in cattle, the scheme of Judith’s convent education was put through by the major’s wife, who had kept her New England conscience, the discomforts of frontier posts notwithstanding.