+-------------------------------------------------+ |Transcriber's note: | | | |Obvious typographic errors have been corrected. | | | +-------------------------------------------------+ HOMESTEAD RANCH [Illustration: "TIRED?" HE ASKED. "IT'S TOUGH THE FIRST TIME YOU COME OVER THIS TRAIL."] HOMESTEAD RANCH BY ELIZABETH G. YOUNG [Illustration: Logo] D. APPLETON AND COMPANY NEW YORK : : LONDON : : MCMXXIII COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY D. APPLETON AND COMPANY Copyright, 1915, 1919, by Perry Mason Company PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA TO MARY TRACY HORNE KINDEST OF CRITICS AND WISEST OF FRIENDS HOMESTEAD RANCH CHAPTER I Now that the train had crossed the Rocky Mountains, most of the passengers in the tourist car were becoming bored and restless. The scenery was less absorbing; there was so much of it that even its magnificence had begun to pall! Yet Harriet Holliday was still deeply interested in everything. There were now only a few hours between her and her destination, and she had begun to look at the solitary ranches, wondering whether her brother's would look like them. The train was passing across a seemingly endless desert, through ranges of hills without a sign of life, without water, grass or trees to break the monotony of sand and sagebrush. Once in a great while there appeared a row of buildings that, Harriet decided, must be a town--a few boxlike stores, a hotel with an imposing cement block front, a straggling line of cabins, some turf-roofed huts, some tents--then abruptly the gray solitude of the desert came into view once more. Harriet thought of the clustering villages along the Connecticut shore--the white-and-green houses sheltered by elms, the church spire on the hill. Home seemed suddenly unutterably far away. A queer ache surged up in her throat. She felt not only endlessly far in miles from home, but in time, too--as if she had left the year 1912 behind her and come somehow into the vanished days of the first pioneers. To keep back the tears she glanced hastily up and down the car at the people who for several days had been her companions and nearly all of whom had given her glowing accounts of "the West." A different promise had lured each, and each promise seemed golden. One family had sold the railroad shares from which they had drawn an income and had bought an apple orchard in Oregon. An old couple were on their way to California to invest in an orange grove. A newly married pair were on their way to a timber claim in Washington. A young public school teacher had given up a good position in Chicago to take a district school in Montana where she could homestead. Oddly enough, not one of those to whom Harriet had spoken so far was expecting to settle in Idaho.