Ruth Holland stood at the window looking out at Colorado in January. The wide valley was buried under snow. It was late afternoon and the sun was passing behind the western mountains. From the window where she stood she could not see the western mountains, but the sunset colors had been thrown over to the eastern range, some fifty miles away. When she first came there, five years before, it had seemed strange to find the east lighted at sunset, more luminous than the west. The eastern range was a mighty one. Now there was snow down to its feet and there was no warmth in the colors that lighted it. They only seemed to reveal that the mountains were frozen. It would not have seemed possible for red--those mountains had been named Sangre de Cristo because they went red at sunset--to be so dazzling cold. The lighted snow brought out the contour of the mountains. They were wonderfully beautiful so, but the woman looking out at them was not thinking of them as beautiful. She was thinking of them as monuments of coldness. To her it was as if they had locked that valley in to merciless cold. But it was not the sunset colors that really marked coming night for her. All through that winter something else had marked night, something she tried to keep from looking out at, but which she was not able to hold away from. She was looking at it now, looking off into the adjoining field where the sheep were huddling for the night. They had begun their huddling some time before. With the first dimming of the light, the first wave of new cold that meant coming night, a few of them would get together; others would gather around them, then more and more. Now there was the struggle not to be left on the outside. The outer ones were pushing toward the center; they knew by other nights that this night would be frigid, that they could only keep alive by that warmth they could get from one another. Yet there were always some that must make that outer rim of the big circle, must be left there to the unbroken cold. She watched them; it had become a terrible thing for her to see, but she could not keep from looking. Many of those unprotected sheep had died that bitter winter; others would die before spring came. It was a cruel country, a country of cold.