“Three hundred head,” she said, “prime on hoof—at thirteen-fifty——” and her pen began to travel evenly across the page before her. CHAPTER IV THE MYSTERY OF BLUE STONE CAÑON The spring sailed by like a full-rigged ship on a windy sea, bright with sun, sweet with surging airs, a thing of swiftness and delight. On the rich flats of Nameless, Nance Allison tilled her soil and her blue eyes caressed the land. She loved every sparkling ripple of the whispering stream, every cloud-shadow on the austere slopes, each jutting shoulder of ridge and spine. The homestead was a fetish with her. It had been her Pappy’s dream of empire. It was hers. He had stuck by and toiled, had secured his patent, made the good start. She asked nothing better than to carry on, to see it prosper and endure. But strange disasters had befallen her, one after the other—first and bitterest, the hidden rope stretched in a cattle trail two years back, just after John Allison’s mysterious death, which sent young Bud’s pony tumbling to the gulch below and left the boy to walk lopsided ever after. At that the girl had almost weakened in her stubborn purpose. She had held the young head in her arms many a weary hour when the pain was worst, and tried to build a plan of a future away from Nameless Valley, but Bud would not listen. The bare thought made him fret and toss, sent the red blood burning in his cheeks. “We’ll never let ’em beat us out, Nance,” he would pant with his hot breath, “the land is ours, safe and legal, and no bunch o’ cut-throats is goin’ to get it from us. Not while we can stand—not while we can ride or plow—or use a gun!” But Nance would stop him always there. “‘Thy rod and Thy staff they comfort me,’” she would say gently, “we have no need of guns, Bud.” However, as the seasons passed, each with its promise and its inevitable blight, her face had became graver, less smiling. There had been the hay fire then—the fire in the night where no fire was or had been. There had been the six fat steers that disappeared from the range and were never heard of, though Bud rode Buckskin to a lather in a fruitless search for them. There had been the good harness cut to pieces one night when Bud had forgotten to lock it up. All these had been disasters in a real sense to these people living so meagerly with their scant possessions. And this year they were more than poor, they were in debt to McKane for the new harness that had to be bought to replace the other. But Nance looked at her field of corn coming in long rows of tender green on the brown floor of the well worked land and hoped. She was prone to hope. It was part of her equipment for the battle of life, her shield before the lance of her courage, her buckler of energy. “It looks like a heavy crop, McKane,” she told the trader honestly, “and I’ll have far and away more than enough for you—I think I’ll have enough left for my winter stake.”