She had never before had so wonderful a chance of seeing the whole country, across to where, on the horizon, the mighty peaks of the Rocky Mountains held their snowy fronts. The hills always stirred something in Nettie that was vaguely yearning, something that thrilled even while it pained. Though prairie born, and prairie raised, she aspired to the hills, not knowing why, except that the hills seemed to her lifted up, up, up, into the clouds themselves. She had a childlike faith that "something good" would come to her out of the hills. That "something good" she recognized with rapture in the young rider from the great Bar Q who one autumn day had spent a never-to-be-forgotten hour at the D. D. D.
For several days long files of the Bar Q cattle had been trailing down from the hill country. They were being driven from the summer range in the foothills to the grain ranches on the prairie where, in the shelter of the long cattle sheds, or loose in the sunlit pastures where stood the great straw and hay stacks, the mothers of the famous herd were especially housed and nurtured during the winter months, in preparation for the spring crop of calves.
This annual fall movement was an exciting event in the lives of the young Days. The children kept count of every head of cattle that passed along the road, and there was great excitement and glee the following spring, when the herd returned to the foothills, with the pretty, white-faced calves "at heel."
Nettie was no less thrilled than her small brothers and sisters by the advent of the Bar Q cattle, and up to the time of her mother's death she, too, had scrambled with them under and over barbed wire fences, and scampered across pasture lands to reach the road in time to see the cattle pour by. After her mother's death, things changed for Nettie. The babies tied her to the house, and the best she could do was to go as far as the edge of the corrals, a baby tucked under either arm, and toddlers clinging to her skirts. Here, standing upon a rail, she would call across to the flying youngsters her admonitions to be careful.
That fall, however, hankering again to see the great herd from the hills as it passed to the lower lands, Nettie scrubbed the faces of her grimy little brood, arrayed them in clean jumpers made from bleached flour sacks, piled them aboard the old hay wagon, to which "Tick," a brother of thirteen, had already harnessed the team of geldings, and taking up the reins in her competent hands, she started for the trail.
Nettie was a big girl, with the softly maturing figure of a young Juno. She looked more than her fifteen years. Her hair was as gold as the Alberta sun, whose warmth, together with her unwonted excitement, brought a flush to either rounded cheek. Her blue eyes, wide and candid, returned the smiles of the riders, who were visibly impressed by the picture she made driving her wagonload of tow-headed children out into the road. The eyes of the young men brightened; wide hats and flowing ties were adjusted, as they rode on in the sunlight, whistling and singing and whirling loose lariats in their hands. More than one of them made a mental note of the necessity of seeking strayed cattle in the near neighborhood of the D. D. D., and when the last of the herd disappeared down the grade, single horseman rode out of the bush and paused alongside the Day wagon.
His broad face was sunburned, freckled, and ruddy, and wore a wide, friendly smile. He looked very straight out of clear eyes, eyes often seen in western Canada where men are ever gazing out over great distances, eyes that seem to hold the spirit of the outdoors and the freshness of unspoiled youth. The way he swept his large hat from his head and held it over the pommel of his saddle had something in it of unconscious grace and native courtliness, and he looked curiously boyish with his thick crop of brown hair ruffled by the slight wind.
Had anyone in the Day wagon seen a roan heifer? "She" had given him a "sight of trouble." Got into the bush half a mile down the grade, and "hanged if she didn't get plumb out o' sight somewhere in the willows."
No one in the Day wagon had seen a roan heifer; and the inquirer, screwing up his face, and scratching the side of his neck, ruminated in puzzled wonder as to the whereabouts of the missing animal, his eyes resting, meanwhile, upon the lifted, glowing face of the girl in the driver's seat.
While random conjecture and suggestion were being offered by each of the boys and girls, the rider sat up suddenly alert and pointing toward some invisible speck, which he declared was "back of the shack there," he touched spurs to the flanks of his broncho and was off toward the house after the elusive lost one. But when the wagon pulled up into the barnyard, and the children and Nettie scrambled down, and crossed the yard to the house, they found the cowpuncher sitting disconsolately on the step, fanning himself with his great hat. Shaking his head at the shouted queries of the Day boys, as to whether he had found her, he replied: