“To save the sheep, lass. We had no time to stop the fire. We rode straight around the crag there, and up to the hill range where the sheep were, then drove them down into the coulee, the cut in the hills, mind, and so to the valley.”
“And the fire just burned until it stopped of itself?” asked Ruth, again. “Think of all the young trees, and everything.”
“Ay, and we do think too, about it,” smiled back the old rancher, grimly. “My second lad, Archie, will be a ranger, some day. He’s swift after that sort of thing. Jean’s glad too. She’s like her mother. I can see my day’s work before me, and do it, but Mrs. Murray and Jeanie look out to the hill views, I’m thinking, and they see what the next generation will demand from us.”
“I know,” Ruth exclaimed, eagerly. “Miss Murray has told us that, too; how each of us adds our own little part to the building of the ages, and if it is weak, then the others suffer, more than we do, even.”
“That’s Jeanie,” he nodded his head slowly. “And it is a good builder she is herself.”
“Girls,” called Jean from the team behind them. “When we turn to the right next time, it’s the home road, and it used to be an old Indian trail, didn’t it, father?”
“Sandy will be telling them all about those things,” her father replied. “I’m a new settler when he’s about. I’ve only been here thirty years, and he came in the days of the gold digging up in the Hills. He was a scout with Custer, and long before. Get him well started any night, by the camp fire or just on the doorstoop with a good pipeful of tobacco, and it’s no sleep you’ll have for hours. He holds the stories of these hill ranges and mountain tops in his hand, and he loves a good audience, Sandy does.”
“Sandy? That is Miss Diantha’s husband, isn’t it?” asked Isabel.
“He is Mrs. Sandy’s husband, nowadays,” replied Mr. Murray, smilingly. “Nobody calls her anything but that. Mother told her you’d be coming out to us, and she will drive over next week some day. Ready for the fording, Don?”
“Ready, dad,” answered Don, and the ponies hit the down trail with a clattering of the swinging shafts and a thud of hoofs, as though they, too, enjoyed what lay ahead of them.