When the driver of the “grub wagon” came with supplies and the news of the ranch, he brought a letter from Lucy; and he took away a letter for her, when he departed. The news from home was cheering. Outwardly at least matters had not changed there. No one had come, and no one had gone, and the usual work was going on.

More than once the driver came, and each time Justin saw him depart with unspoken longing. He would have given much to be privileged to go back with him. Yet Justin was not and had not been lonely in the ordinary meaning of that word; he was lonely for the companionship of Lucy Davison, for the glance of her brown eyes, for the music of her words; but, possessing that inner light of the mind in which Clayton believed, it brightened his isolation as with a sacred fire, filled the wooded slopes and craggy heights with life and beauty, and suggested deep thoughts and deeper imaginings.

Filled with dreams and work, with desire and accomplishment, the slow months rolled by. With the descent of the snow-line on the high peaks the sheep were driven into the foot-hills, and then on down into the plain itself, where not only grass, but the various sages—black, white, salt and bud sage—together with shad-scale and browse, furnished an abundance of the food they liked.

Then they were taken away, their summer herding having been a good investment for Fogg; and Justin returned to Paradise Valley, clear-eyed, sturdy, and handsomer even than before. He had learned well the to him necessary lesson of patience, and had tasted the joy of duty well done. More than all, he had begun to find himself, and to know that childhood and youth had fallen from him, and that he was a man.

CHAPTER XI
THE TRAGEDY OF THE RANGE

Justin was startled by the changes which had come to Paradise Valley in the closing weeks of his long isolation in the mountains. Steve Harkness and Pearl Newcome were married, and Lucy Davison had been sent East to school. The latter filled him almost with a feeling of dismay. Among the other changes to be noted was that William Sanders had written letters to a number of farmers, some of whom were now in the valley and had taken government land or purchased mortgaged quarter-sections.

Justin discovered, in talks with them, that these men had been neighbors of Sanders on the irrigated lands at Sumner. They had sold out there, as Sanders had done, and having heard from him of the possibilities of Paradise Valley, they had moved to it, with their families and belongings. Others, it was reported, were coming. Some of them brought a few cows, as well as horses; and before the winter storms came they erected cheap dug-outs for themselves, and prepared flimsy shelters and cut wild hay for their stock. It was their intention to try irrigation.

Justin soothed his disappointment at not seeing Lucy Davison by writing many letters to her, to which she replied sparingly. He was away from home much of the time, riding lonely lines with other cowboys. Whenever he came home and found no letter from Lucy he felt discouraged; when one was there, he returned to his work cheered and comforted. As for Ben, Justin saw little of him. Davison kept them well apart, by giving them separate assignments.

In the severest of the winter storms, when the grass of the range had been covered with snow for many days, the cattle breached the fences, and mingling with cattle from other ranches they began to roam over the mesas and valley, a terror to the settlers, and as destructive as the locusts of Egypt. The cowboys could do nothing with them; could not hold them on the open lines, and could not repair the broken fences in the bitter cold and the blinding snow. It was a repetition in miniature of the days when the whole of the Great Plains was an open range, and cattle, shelterless and without food, wandered in the winter storms in pitiable distress, dying by thousands.

As it was useless and perilous to try to ride any line, Justin and the other cowboys came home. Justin’s feet and hands were frosted, and he went to Clayton’s, where he remained, to have the benefit of Clayton’s medical skill as well as his companionship.