Colina groomed her own horse, whistling like a boy. Saddling him, she
rode east along the trail by the river, with the fenced grain fields on
her right hand.

Beyond the fields she could gallop at will over the rolling, grassy
bottoms, among the patches of scrub and willow.

It was not an impressively beautiful scene--the river was half a mile
wide, broken by flat wooded islands overflowed at high water; the banks
were low, and at this season muddy. But the sky was as blue as
Colina's eyes, and the prairie, quilted with wild flowers, basked in
the delicate radiance that only the northern sun can bestow.

On a horse Colina could not be actively unhappy, nevertheless she was
conscious of a certain dissatisfaction with life. Not as a result of
the discussion with her father--she felt she had come off rather well
from that.

But it was warm, and she felt a touch of languor. Fort Enterprise was
a little dull in early summer. The fur season was over, and the flour
mill was closed; the Indians had gone to their summer camps; and the
steamboat had lately departed on her first trip up river, taking most
of the company employees in her crew.

There was nothing afoot just now but farming, and Colina was not much
interested in that. In short, she was lonesome. She rode idly with
long detours inland in search of nothing at all.

Loping over the grass and threading her way among the poplar saplings,
Colina proceeded farther than she had ever been in this direction since