move to Wyoming, then in the golden age of the cattle industry. Those were
days when steers, to speak in the cow language, had "jumped to
seventy-five." The wilderness grew light-headed with prosperity. Wonderful
are the tales still told about those fat years in cattle-land. It was in
those halcyon days of the Cheyenne Club that the members rode from the
range, white with the dust of the desert, to enjoy greater luxuries than
those procurable at their clubs in New York.

Nor was it all feasting and merrymaking. A heroic band it was that battled
with the wilderness, riding the range with heat and cold, starvation and
death, and making small pin-pricks in that empty blotch of the United
States map that is marked "Great Alkali Desert" blossom into settlements.
When the last word has been said about the pioneers of these United
States, let the cow-boy be remembered in the universal toast, that bronzed
son of the saddle who lived his little day bravely and merrily, and whose
real heroism is too often forgotten in the glamour of his own
picturesqueness.

Judith was ten years old when her father, his wife, and their children
moved from Dakota—they were not so particular about North and South
Dakota, in those days—to take up a claim on Sweetwater, Wyoming. Judith
gave scant promise of the beauty that in later life became at once her
dower and her misfortune, that which was as likely to bring wretchedness
as happiness. In Wyoming she was destined to find an old friend, Mrs.
Atkins, who, as the bride of the young lieutenant, had been present at the
marriage of Sally Tumlin and Warren Rodney, and who had always felt a
wholly unreasonable sense of guilt at witnessing the ceremony and
contributing a lace handkerchief to the bride. Her husband, now Major
Atkins, was stationed at Fort Washakie, Wyoming. Mrs. Atkins happening
again on the Rodney family, and her husband having increased and