As Harry rode up, the morning sunshine was beaming over all; on the chickens scratching in front of the cow shed, on the scarlet poppies beside the path. Yet to Harry the clutch of poverty seemed actually visible. What a place for a young girl to grow up in! Chopping wood, plowing, herding sheep; while the good-for-nothing father and brother went fishing and hunting! "I'd like to take her to stay with me all winter," Harry thought in sympathetic indignation. "If she had half a chance, she'd make something worth while of herself. How thankful I am for my life!" No one was visible about the place, and Harry knocked twice before she got any response. Then halting steps came across the room within, the door was unlocked, and Isita's mother stood in the narrow opening. "Oh! It's Miss Holliday. The hogs down bothering you again? I told that Joe----" "No, indeed. The hogs haven't bothered us lately. I came to ask Isita to help me with my Fourth of July dinner." Harry put all the friendly warmth possible into her voice. She remembered that this work-worn woman who faced her there with a sort of defiant anxiety had been a New England farmer's daughter, and that many a time in her girlhood she must have helped with a big company dinner in honor of the national holiday. But Mrs. Biane merely drew back a little and raised her hand in abrupt refusal. "No, thank you. It's kind of you to ask Isita, but I wouldn't want her to go." She began to close the door. "Oh, please don't refuse!" Harry begged. She had no intention of yielding so easily. "It would be doing me a real favor to let her come. It's so hard to do everything alone, and Isita is the only young girl I know well enough to ask to help me." She used all her eloquence, her most persuasive warmth, but even while she talked she was aware of something in the woman's silence, a sort of dread, that made her unwilling to let Isita go; but at last, won over by Harry's friendliness, Mrs. Biane yielded, saying only that Isita must be home before dark. "Why didn't her mother want her to come?" Harry asked herself as she rode away. "Why are they so unfriendly? There's something wrong there. No wonder Isita looks scared and unhappy. I wonder where she was. Off herding the sheep, probably. That looks like one of them now--near our fence, as usual." A glimpse of something white moving in the sagebrush had caught her eye. She rode toward it, and discovered, not a sheep, but a young calf. "What's happened to these scrub cows?" Harry exclaimed. "I never saw anything like the way they desert their calves. This is the second I've found left to starve. If rustlers were busy, they'd shoot the cows and carry the calves off." Too young to graze, the calf was gaunt from lack of food and made no effort to escape when Harry began to drive it. Instead, it merely stumbled forward a few steps and stopped.