from the steep trail to the level, each racing across the yard as if with
intent to burst through the schoolhouse door, each bringing up with the
same pull back of foaming horse to its haunches. And with each horse came
a dog of highly varied breed.

The youngsters had been racing about the ledge for some time before
the grown people began to appear. The women, most of them very handsome,
were dressed dowdily in mackinaws and anomalous foot covering. But the
men were resplendent in chaps and short leather coats, with gay silk
neckerchiefs, with silver spurs and embossed saddles.

When Judith returned with Maud Day there were thirty or forty people and
almost as many dogs milling about the yard. The log school had weathered
against the red wall of the mesa for fifty years. There probably was not
a person in the crowd who had not gone to school there, who did not, like
Judith, love every log in its ugly sides. Judith caught Douglas' sardonic
gaze, tossed her curly head and urged Swift up the steps, where she
looked toward the road to the Pass, shading her fine eyes with a mittened
hand.

Finally she cried, "I see the preacher coming!"

"Somebody ought to go in and build the fire if we ain't going to freeze
to death!" exclaimed Grandma Brown, jogging up on a flea-bitten black
mule.

"He invited himself. Let him build his own fire!" cried Douglas.

Grandma pulled her spectacles down from her forehead to the bridge of her
capable nose, and stared at Douglas.