and lay up muniments for fresh campaigns; and the “colonel” would betake himself to resorts where balm is accorded wounded honour; while loose-mouthed, simple-eyed young fellows went East for the winter lighter as to purse, wiser as to the ways of paying for pleasure.  Altogether, it was not surprising her father kept apart from “the English Colony,” Eleanor reflected.  She passed out to the piazza spanning all sides of the ranch house.

It was a sun-bathed, sun-kissed, sun-fused world.  The River flowed liquid silver jubilant and singing.  The morning mists rolled up primrose spangled with jewels, while over all lay such light as hypnotized the senses into a sort of dazzled dream world.  Ashes of roses!  There were no ashes here.  It was the rose, itself; a world veiled in gold mist, wind-blown, flame-fired of joy, little cressets of fire edging every ridge.  The sheep browsing in the Valley, the fleece-clouds herding mid the winds of the upper peaks, you hardly knew which shone whiter.  The burnished mountain with its silver cross and wings of light, opal about the peaks, melting in fading lines about the base, with the middle distances lost in gashed purple shadows, might have been a thing of airy fancy.  So might the dark forested Ridge where the evergreens stood sentinels among wisps of cloud.  And everywhere, all pervasive, sifting through the shadows of silvered pine needles and trembling poplars, permeated the cinnamon smell of the barky forest world, resinous of balsam, spicy with the tang of life.

She could see the mountain streams where they laughed down the Ridge in wind-tattered spray.  With the glass, too, she could see a little blue wreath of man-made smoke curling up from the evergreens; and waves of happiness, absurd warm glowing happiness, broke over her, the sheer gladness of being alive.  Whatever sinister thing kept her father apart, it was here she belonged—­she knew it now—­to the great spacious life-stimulating West; to the world resinous with imprisoned sunbeams; not to the lands of sky shut out by twenty story roofs and pea-soup fogs and sickly anaemic views of life.  Life was good.  She drank of it and called it good as in creation’s prime.

Once she called Central up on the telephone.  Central answered that the Ridge line had been cut.  Such duties as men’s hands could not do round ranch houses, she finished in a dream, turning with a touch the house into a home; flowers for the middle of the big table, dishes pitchforked down replaced in order, corner cobwebs speared with a duster on a broom, Navajo rugs uncurled and squared, stale cooking expelled from littered shelves, flies pursued to the last ditch, breaks in the mosquito wire round the piazza tacked up, heaps of mended socks and overalls sent out to the bunk house for the ranch hands, milk cans buried—­it had always been one of the absurdities she was going to reform, that people used canned milk in a cow country; but, unfortunately, the obstacle to that reform was that cows could not be milked on horseback.