Page:Ritchie - Trails to Two Moons.djvu/44

 to end wall; one door leading to the lean-to kitchen; another through the thin partition of Hilma's own room; a great fireplace of stones and mud bisecting the rear wall. The furnishings were Spartan: A heavy table in the middle of the floor; three homemade chairs with rawhide bottoms; a squatty trunk of blue glazed zinc and chipped lacquer; on the walls four colored lithographs from which the advertising matter had been cut; and a glassed-over print of a Danish king and queen,—the king had quaint old-world whiskers and his royal spouse wore her gown in early Victorian decolletté. Nothing more to look at than this scant inventory. If the mind of one alone tired of reviewing this slender invitation to beguilement there was a huge Bible in the zinc trunk and a pink plush album of atrocious portraits. Also, a doll.

The lonesomeness of the great range came to sit down with Hilma. To-night it was more poignant than usual. The girl's imagination, never obtrusive, began to play in a manner surprising to her, and it centered round the silhouette of the horseman against the green sky. Insensibly her thoughts drifted to Jed Monk, sheepman, and what her father had