And such a life as she had lived! Arthurs had at once placed a horse at her disposal, and with a fierce delight at the leap she was taking through conventions she swung her right leg over the saddle and sat to place like any man. Although born and raised on a farm, horseback riding was to her something of a novelty, and the assumption of the masculine position was a positive epoch in her career. How the people of Plainville would have been scandalized if they could have witnessed her shocking familiarity with a horse! She thought of an English girl who had been cut by the good society of Plainville because she dared to ride like a biped instead of a mermaid. And she laughed in a wild exultant freedom, while the wind whipped her hair about her shoulders, and she felt her mount firm beneath her as they cantered across the brown foothills.
Such hills they were! In her native plains they would have been mountains of themselves, wonders of Nature to point out to strangers and to hold in a kind of awe across the country-side, but here they were foothills, mere fragments dropped from the trowel of the Builder as He reared the majestic Rockies behind. And though she often in the early morning, or at sunset, or when the moon was full and white, feasted her eyes and her soul on the cold splendour of the mighty range, it was to the warm brown foothills, with their stubbling of little trees and their solemn warts of grey-green rock, that her heart turned with something of human affection. At first Uncle Fred, or Aunt Lilian, or, a little later, one of the two cowboys rode with her on her expeditions, but her prairie sense of direction quickly adapted itself to her new surroundings, and she soon learned to keep a keen eye for the precipitous cut-banks that drop sheer from a level plain and lie as unsuspected in the saffron sunlight as a coyote among the ripened willows. There were quicksands, too—spots where the water sprang from the hillside in a crystal stream and in a few yards soaked into the kneady earth as in a sponge—but all these places were fenced; even in Alberta, where cattle grow like rabbits on the range, the paving of sink-holes with beef steers is an expensive expedient. So Beulah quickly got her foothill sense, and in a week was riding, care-free and exultant, across the ranges as her heart listed or her horse preferred.
One morning, just as the first grey of dawn mottled the darkness of her chamber, Beulah heard her door open, and through the uncertain light she discerned Arthurs gently entering with a rifle in his hand. She sat up, alert, but not afraid; the tingling health in her veins left no place for fear and suffered no foolishness on the part of her nervous system.
"What is it, Uncle Fred?" she whispered.
"H-s-h," he cautioned. "You know we have been losing calves with the timber wolves? Well, there are two of the murderers just across from the corral. I thought you might want to see them."
In an instant her feet were on the floor, and, hand in hand, she and Arthurs stole to the window. At first her eyes could distinguish nothing in the darkness, but by following Arthurs' index finger she at last located two gaunt, shaggy creatures a little way up the hillside beyond the corral, and a couple of hundred yards from the house.
"However did you know they were there?" she whispered. "You must have cat's eyes. I could hardly see them when you pointed them out."
"Not cat's eyes, Beulah," he answered. "Just rancher's eyes. I heard the horses snorting, and I fancied there were visitors. Now, will you take first shot?"
"Oh, that would be a shame. They would get away, and besides, I might kill a horse."
"Well, won't press it this time," said Arthurs, "because I have a little personal score to settle with these fellows. I guess I have about five hundred dollars invested in each of them."