The Fighting Shepherdess

E-text prepared by Roger Frank and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net)

Kate was sitting on a rock--a dark picturesque silhouette against the sky. See page 235.
Copyright, 1919, By SMALL, MAYNARD & COMPANY (Incorporated)
SECOND PRINTING, FEBRUARY, 1919 THIRD PRINTING, MARCH, 1919 FOURTH PRINTING, MARCH, 1919 FIFTH PRINTING, MAY, 1919 SIXTH PRINTING, JUNE, 1919

A heavily laden freight wagon, piled high with ranch supplies, stood in the dooryard before a long loghouse. The yard was fenced with crooked cottonwood poles so that it served also as a corral, around which the leaders of the freight team wandered, stripped of their harness, looking for a place to roll.
A woman stood on tip-toe gritting her teeth in exasperation as she tugged at the check-rein on the big wheelhorse, which stuck obstinately in the ring. When she loosened it finally, she stooped and looked under the horse’s neck at the girl of fourteen or thereabouts, who was unharnessing the horse on the other side. “Good God, Kate,” exclaimed the woman irritably; “how many times must I tell you to unhook the traces before you do up the lines? One of these days you’ll have the damnedest runaway in seven states.”
The girl, whose thoughts obviously were not on what she was doing, obeyed immediately, and without replying looped up the heavy traces, throwing and tying the lines over the hames with experienced hands.
The resemblance between mother and daughter was so slight that it might be said not to exist at all. It was clear that Kate’s wide, thoughtful eyes, generous mouth and softly curving but firm chin came from the other side, as did her height. Already she was half a head taller than the short, wiry, tough-fibered woman with the small hard features who was known throughout the southern half of Wyoming as “Jezebel of the Sand Coulee.”
A long flat braid of fair hair swung below the girl’s waist and on her cheeks a warm red showed through the golden tan. Her slim straight figure was eloquent of suppleness and strength and her movements, quick, purposeful, showed decision and activity of mind. They were as characteristic as her directness of speech.