I have tried to sleep but cannot.  Your old Mountain has been talking again.  I can see the Cross here from my window and the lone star above the peak; and I know that you see too.  If I touched the telephone, I might speak to you; but I can write more frankly than I’d ever have courage to speak, and I must say it.  It is all tumult.  I do not understand, but Hope is strumming her strings—­I hear them every time the wind comes down from the Ridge.  Here is the Watts’ ’Happy Warrior,’ and Dick—­listen—­I didn’t mean it as a token when I offered to send it up.  I meant it as a rallying cry; but now that you take it as a token, I can’t say that it isn’t; only I really didn’t mean to push you over the edge of things as I did.  I didn’t mean to go over the edge myself.  If I had heard Senator Moyese talk, I couldn’t have been so childish and ignorant.  It was like urging you to jump a precipice and break your neck.  I know now what the fight means.  It isn’t just the Valley.  It’s the Nation.  I hadn’t any right to let my (here a word was crossed and blotted) feeling shove you over.  Yet if you jump yourself, I’ll not pull a gossamer thread to draw back.  I haven’t any right.

You know how it has always been with me—­whisked away to the convent at Quebec when I was four, sent to that New York finishing school to get what Father called ‘world-sense knocked into my religion.’  Well, they were knocks all right.  Then England and Switzerland and my Father’s orders to come back, and how lonely and apart he always seems.  I don’t understand.  What did Moyese mean to-night when he spoke of ‘bow-and-arrow aristocracy’?  Will you believe me that is the first I have ever heard of it?  Who is Calamity?  Will you tell me if you know?  Why are we so apart from all the people of the Valley?  What is a ‘squaw man’?  When I think, I am afraid for having let you become so interwoven.  I did not mean to.  It is wholly my fault.  The thoughts I hardly knew myself must have been weaving up into this.  They often do.  Father and Mr. Williams leave at daybreak for the Upper Pass.  I did not mean to write so much, but our old Mountain has come from under a cloud.  Anyway, I had to explain, no, I mean write.  Explanations never do explain; but here’s the picture of ‘The Warrior.’

“E.  MacD.”

Going to the French window of her bedroom, Eleanor called down to old Calamity’s room below.  To her surprise, the half-breed woman on the instant poked her head above the balcony railing of the basement quarters.

“Going to the Ridge to-morrow, Calamity?”

“Oui, Mademoiselle, surement,” pattered Calamity softly in that Cree patois which is neither French nor Indian.

“Then, take this up to Mr. Wayland, please!”

As she withdrew to her room, Eleanor became conscious that she could not remember a day since she had come back to the Valley when the Cree half-breed had not been within call or sight.  The girl suddenly pressed both hands to her eyes.  What had Moyese meant?