Page:Lost Ecstasy (1927).pdf/220

 thither their strange freight from the far-off back country, small drowned creatures, charred trees from some forgotten forest fire, perhaps an empty tin from a cattle camp.

Morning and evening in still pools the trout were beginning to ride, cutthroats with their red-gashed jaws, delicately tinted dolly-vardens, and rainbows. On the mountain slopes some of the evergreen trees showed red from winterkill, and lower down certain of the cottonwoods and elders had bent under the heavy snows and lived on, twisted and anemic, like creatures recovering from a long illness. The deer and elk had retreated into the depths of the range.

There was hope among the stockmen that early summer. The winter had been normal, and freight rates were coming down. Their cattle were fattening on the new grass. True, the good days were gone beyond recall; the public domain had been taken from them and given to homesteaders, who lived awhile, starved, sometimes died, and left their wives behind them when they went! But the plains and mountains of the back country showed more cattle than ever before. If only the summer was normal like the winter and spring, then, please God

The wheat men, too, were cheerful. There was a tariff wall against Canadian wheat, and their own fields were promising. True, they could not farm like the Newcomb job, north on the Reservation. Newcomb had made wheatgrowing an engineering matter, connected his farm machinery to great caterpillar engines, harrowed, drilled and sowed with a dozen clattering machines connected in sequence, thought in hundreds of thousands where they thought in fives and twos.

But their fields were green and promising. Now, if they had enough rain, and no grasshoppers or hail, then, please God

If. If. The eternal "if" of the Northwest, placing its hopes in the Almighty and a government which seemed to have forgotten it, and its confidence in itself and its strong men.

Tom was restless on the train until the last day. Then Kay, waking early, found him bending over and staring out