Miss Armitage, squaring her shoulders and sitting very erect once more, her lips closed in a straight red line drove firmly on.  A stream ran musically along the road side,—­a stream so small it was marvelous it had a voice.  As they rounded the mountain, the gap widened into the mouth of the vale, which lifted back to an upper bench, over-topped by a lofty plateau.  Then she swung the team around and stopped.  The way was cut off by a barbed wire fence.

The enclosure was apparently a corral for a flock of Angora goats.  There was no gate for the passage of teams; the road ended there, and a rough sign nailed to a hingeless wicket warned the wayfarer to “Keep Out.”  On a rocky knob near this entrance a gaunt, hard-featured woman sat knitting.  She measured the trespassers with a furtive, smouldering glance and clicked her needles with unnecessary force.

Tisdale’s eyes made a swift inventory of the poor shelter, half cabin, partly shed, that evidently housed both the woman and her flock, then searched the barren field for some sort of hitching post.  But the few bushes along the stream were small, kept low, doubtless, by the browsing goats, and his glance rested on a fringe of poplars beyond the upper fence.

“There’s no way around,” he said at last, and the amusement broke softly in his face.  “We will have to go through.”

“The wicket will take the team singly,” she answered, “but we must unhitch and leave the buggy here.”

“And first, if you think you can hold the colts that long, I must tackle this thistle.”

“I can manage,” she said, and the sparkles danced in her eyes, “unless you are vanquished.”

The woman rose and stood glowering while he sprang down and drew the wooden pin to open the wicket.  Then, “You keep off my land,” she ordered sharply.  “I will, madam,” he answered quietly, “as soon as I am satisfied it is yours.”

“I’ve lived on this claim ’most five years,” she screamed.  “I’m homesteading, and when I’ve used the water seven years, I get the rights.”  She sprang backward with a cattish movement and caught up a gun that had been concealed in some bushes.  “Now you go,” she said.

But Tisdale stayed.  He stood weighing her with his steady, appraising eyes, while he drew the township plat from his pocket.

“This is the quarter section I have come to look up.  It starts here, you see,”—­and having unfolded the map, he turned to hold it under her glance—­“at the mouth of this gap, and lifts back through the pocket, taking in the slopes to this bench and on up over this ridge to include these springs.”

The woman, curbing herself to look at the plat, allowed the rifle to settle in the curve of her arm.  “I piped the water down,” she said.  “This stream was a dry gully.  I fenced and put up a house.”