whom she loved and called father, who had indeed been a father to her.  That choice had been to go to school in Denver.  Four years she had lived away from her beloved gray hills and black mountains.  Only once since her return had she climbed to this height, and that occasion, too, was memorable as an unhappy hour.  It had been three years ago.  To-day girlish ordeals and griefs seemed back in the past:  she was a woman at nineteen and face to face with the first great problem in her life.

The trail came up back of the bluff, through a clump of aspens with white trunks and yellow fluttering leaves, and led across a level bench of luxuriant grass and wild flowers to the rocky edge.

She dismounted and threw the bridle.  Her mustang, used to being petted, rubbed his sleek, dark head against her and evidently expected like demonstration in return, but as none was forthcoming he bent his nose to the grass and began grazing.  The girl’s eyes were intent upon some waving, slender, white-and-blue flowers.  They smiled up wanly, like pale stars, out of the long grass that had a tinge of gold.

“Columbines,” she mused, wistfully, as she plucked several of the flowers and held them up to gaze wonderingly at them, as if to see in them some revelation of the mystery that shrouded her birth and her name.  Then she stood with dreamy gaze upon the distant ranges.

“Columbine!...  So they named me—­those miners who found me—­a baby—­lost in the woods—­asleep among the columbines.”  She spoke aloud, as if the sound of her voice might convince her.

So much of the mystery of her had been revealed that day by the man she had always called father.  Vaguely she had always been conscious of some mystery, something strange about her childhood, some relation never explained.

“No name but Columbine,” she whispered, sadly, and now she understood a strange longing of her heart.

Scarcely an hour back, as she ran down the Wide porch of White Slides ranch-house, she had encountered the man who had taken care of her all her life.  He had looked upon her as kindly and fatherly as of old, yet with a difference.  She seemed to see him as old Bill Belllounds, pioneer and rancher, of huge frame and broad face, hard and scarred and grizzled, with big eyes of blue fire.

“Collie,” the old man had said, “I reckon hyar’s news.  A letter from Jack....  He’s comin’ home.”

Belllounds had waved the letter.  His huge hand trembled as he reached to put it on her shoulder.  The hardness of him seemed strangely softened.  Jack was his son.  Buster Jack, the range had always called him, with other terms, less kind, that never got to the ears of his father.  Jack had been sent away three years ago, just before Columbine’s return from school.  Therefore she had not seen him for over seven years.  But she remembered him well—­a big, rangy boy, handsome and wild, who had made her childhood almost unendurable.