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Tortured by hope and doubt, she hurried up the coulee as fast as she could push the baby wagon, the blue coated figure just ahead pushing steadily, silently forward up the coulee. When the excited, panting little group came in sight of the gate, they saw the blue-coated figure standing, leaning upon the rough rail fence, his chin on his palms, gazing at the empty house.
He did not say much when he arrived, and he did not do anything more threatening than hang the handkerchiefs over the guy-ropes to dry, tying the corners to keep the wind from whipping them away up the coulee, but the result was satisfying to Happy Jack, at least. He ate and was filled, and Patsy retired from the fray, sullenly owning defeat for that time at least.
His red wagon may be rumbling and rattling through some newer region, but the "coulee country" knows him no more. 'The creamery man" has taken his place. Every afternoon, rain or shine, the wagons of the North Star Creamery in "Dutcher's Coulee" stop at the farmers' windmills to skim the cream from the "submerged cans."
But it was the part of the garden close about the front porch and verandah where the particular genius of Richard Dunbar showed itself. Here the flowers native to the prairie, the coulee, the canyon, were gathered; the early wind flower, the crowfoot and the buffalo bean, wild snowdrops and violets. Over trellises ran the tiny morning-glory, with vetch and trailing arbutus.
There were nights and nights and nights when the cabin window winked like a star fallen into the coulee, from dusk to red dawn. Ward rode over once, stayed all night, and went home in a silent rage because he could not do a thing. There was a week of fluctuating hope, and a time when the doctor said mommie must go to a hospital Boise, since she had friends there.
"Must be some fool herder just crossing the coulee, on the move somewhere," Weary gave as a solution. "Half of 'em don't know a fence when they see it." As they galloped toward the sound and the smell, they expressed freely their opinion of sheep, the men who owned them, and the lunatics who watched over the blatting things.
"The crossing is northwest." "How far?" he demanded. "Two days' journey, maybe seventy-five miles." "You wait for the boy in the shelter of the poplar bluff across the coulée," he said. "When the snow stops, follow on as well as you can." "Charley not come any more," said Rina in a tone of quiet fatalism. "When snow hide our track, he walk round and round. Bam-by he fall down, and not get up.
At the mouth of the coulee, she turned to the left instead of to the right, and so galloped directly away from the Bar Nothing ranch, down the narrow valley known locally as the Flat, and on to the hills that invited her with their untroubled lights and shadows and the deep scars she knew for canyons. There were no ranches out this way.
He chose the only possible course, but handled the situation in the best possible way. With a sharp cut of the whip he drove the attached horse down upon the one that was half free, and started the two off at a wild race down the steep coulee, into what seemed sheer blackness and immediate disaster.
There were the small-heeled, pointed prints of a woman's foot, and there were the larger tracks of a man, a man of the town. Jean stood with her quirt dangling loosely from her wrist and glanced back toward the stables and down the coulee. She completely forgot that she wanted a rhyme for "hills." What were towns people doing here? And how did they get here?
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