Page:Caroline Lockhart--The Fighting Shepherdess.djvu/17



A heavily laden freight wagon, piled high with ranch supplies, stood in the dooryard before a long loghouse. The yard was fenced with crooked cottonwood poles so that it served also as a corral, around which the leaders of the freight team wandered, stripped of their harness, looking for a place to roll.

A woman stood on tip-toe gritting her teeth in exaspera- tion as she tugged at the check-rein on the big wheelhorse, which stuck obstinately in the ring. When she loosened it finally, she stooped and looked under the horse's neck at the girl of fourteen or thereabouts, who was unhar- nessing the horse on the other side. "Good God, Kate," exclaimed the woman irritably; "how many times must I tell you to unhook the traces before you do up the lines? One of these days you'll have the damnedest runaway in seven states."

The girl, whose thoughts obviously were not on what she was doing, obeyed immediately, and without replying looped up the heavy traces, throwing and tying the lines over the hames with experienced hands.

The resemblance between mother and daughter was so slight that it might be said not to exist at all. It was