Once among the pillows, she fell into the life-bathing sleep of the great mountain ozone-world.  Was it a dream; or had Calamity come stealing through the French window to stand at the foot of her bed?  Waking to a burst of sunlight across her face, Eleanor could not tell in the least whether the memory of the half-breed woman standing in the shadows were dream or reality.  The sun was coming over the Rim Rocks in a fan-shaped shield of spear shafts; and every single shaft wafted down thoughts that refused to lie quiet.  Shafts that have a trick of turning your heart into a target can’t be shut out by armor proof.

Daylight restored her poise.  Her first instinct was to recall the letter; but Calamity had already set off for the Ridge.  The thought hardly took form, but the shadow haunted her.  If It were true, he would surely never let her work round the ranch houses of the Valley.  Breakfast passed as usual, alone in the big raftered dining room after the ranch hands had gone, the lame German cook for the camp wagons hobbling in and out with the dishes.  Stage had passed long since and the mail lay at her place, where the German had spread a white square above the oilcloth of the long bench table; but letters and papers remained unopened.

Perhaps, after all, those midnight thoughts had been morbid as midnight thoughts often are.  It might be that the Valley was apart from them, not they apart from the Valley.  Who were the neighbors from whom her father stood aside?  There was the Senator in the white house across the River.  Well, the Senator spent the most of his time in Smelter City forty miles away, and in Washington.  Then, there were the Williams of the Mission House with their only boy and eighty or a hundred Indian children; gentlefolk keeping up the amenities of refined life, spreading the contagion of beautiful example like an irrigation plot widening slowly over arid sage brush.  Surely her father was held in esteem by them; and they stood for all that was best in the Valley.  Below the ranch houses came what was known as “the English Colony,” a scattering of young bachelors playing at ranching, whose rendezvous was the pretty Swiss chalet known as “the Rookery,” where a wonderful little young-old lady with red wig and hectic flush dispensed lavish hospitality and canned music and old port behind the eminent respectability of a stool-pigeon in the person of a card-loving husband.  The lady’s husband called himself “colonel.”  The Valley called him one of those “no-good Englishmen”; but the Valley may have been mistaken; for even to the ranch house had come tales of outraged honor in the person of the “no-good husband” bursting in on games of cards with wild charges which only the payment of big money could suppress—­suppress you understand, purely for the sake of the lady:  outraged honor could accept no atonement.  Then the lady would flit for the winter to those beauty doctors of Paris and New York, who operate on wrinkles