Page:Cherokee Trails (1928).pdf/71

 sympathy must have clouded the hope of gain in any case.

Eudora had posted notices warning homesteaders and roaming bone pickers to keep clear of their property. Such bones as were scattered along the little river and its tributary creeks and washes were her bones, no matter whose cattle had carried them around under happier conditions, and she intended to have them all. Surely there were bones enough for everybody if they would spread out over the country and find them.

So Eudora Ellison was unloading her bones that bright October morning after the rain, thinking, in the way of youth, that life is mainly hard and useless, and full of disappointment and defeat; thinking that it was a hopeless groping in a maze of difficulties out of which they never would find their way, and that it was an isolated and lonely land in which youth and romance would never meet. She looked up quickly at the neigh of a horse at the gate, and jumped down out of the wagon, running forward as eagerly as if romance had come riding, against all expectation, and she must hasten to tie it up to the hitching-rack before it changed its mind and galloped away.

The horse whinnied again when it saw her coming, stretching its neck, its ears set forward in eagerness, as plainly a hail of joyful greeting as horse ever uttered in this world. The girl's long legs twinkled like the spokes of a wagon wheel, she ran so fast. She bounded to the gate, her brown face flushed, where the horse thrust its head over to greet her with a little squeal almost like a sob of joyful relief. She threw the gate open and flung