I think this letter is about to reach thirty-secondly, so I will send you my sincerest love and quit tiring you.  Please write me when you have time.

  Sincerely yours,
    Elinore Rupert.

II

FILING A CLAIM

     May 24, 1909.

Dear, dear Mrs. Coney,—­

Well, I have filed on my land and am now a bloated landowner.  I waited a long time to even see land in the reserve, and the snow is yet too deep, so I thought that as they have but three months of summer and spring together and as I wanted the land for a ranch anyway, perhaps I had better stay in the valley.  So I have filed adjoining Mr. Stewart and I am well pleased.  I have a grove of twelve swamp pines on my place, and I am going to build my house there.  I thought it would be very romantic to live on the peaks amid the whispering pines, but I reckon it would be powerfully uncomfortable also, and I guess my twelve can whisper enough for me; and a dandy thing is, I have all the nice snow-water I want; a small stream runs right through the center of my land and I am quite near wood.

A neighbor and his daughter were going to Green River, the county-seat, and said I might go along, so I did, as I could file there as well as at the land office; and oh, that trip!  I had more fun to the square inch than Mark Twain or Samantha Allen ever provoked.  It took us a whole week to go and come.  We camped out, of course, for in the whole sixty miles there was but one house, and going in that direction there is not a tree to be seen, nothing but sage, sand, and sheep.  About noon the first day out we came near a sheep-wagon, and stalking along ahead of us was a lanky fellow, a herder, going home for dinner.  Suddenly it seemed to me I should starve if I had to wait until we got where we had planned to stop for dinner, so I called out to the man, “Little Bo-Peep, have you anything to eat?  If you have, we’d like to find it.”  And he answered, “As soon as I am able it shall be on the table, if you’ll but trouble to get behind it.”  Shades of Shakespeare!  Songs of David, the Shepherd Poet!  What do you think of us?  Well, we got behind it, and a more delicious “it” I never tasted.  Such coffee!  And out of such a pot!  I promised Bo-Peep that I would send him a crook with pink ribbons on it, but I suspect he thinks I am a crook without the ribbons.

The sagebrush is so short in some places that it is not large enough to make a fire, so we had to drive until quite late before we camped that night.  After driving all day over what seemed a level desert of sand, we came about sundown to a beautiful canon, down which we had to drive for a couple of miles before we could cross.  In the canon the shadows had already fallen, but when we looked up we could see the last shafts of sunlight on the tops of the great bare buttes.  Suddenly a great wolf started from somewhere and galloped along the edge of the canon, outlined black and clear by the setting sun.  His curiosity overcame him at last, so he sat down and waited to see what manner of beast we were.  I reckon he was disappointed for he howled most dismally.  I thought of Jack London’s “The Wolf.”