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Jean of the Lazy A by B. M. Bower
page 45 of 305 (14%)
glare, and she was riding on one stirrup and letting the
other foot swing free, and she was whirling her quirt
round and round, cartwheel fashion, and whistling an
air that every one knows,--and putting in certain
complicated variations of her own.

At the gate she dismounted without ever missing a
note, gave the warped stake a certain twist and jerk
which loosened the wire loop so that she could slip it
easily over the post, passed through and dragged the
gate with her, dropping it flat upon the ground beside
the trail. There was no stock anywhere in the coulee,
and she would save a little trouble by leaving the gate
open until she came out on her way home. She
stepped aside to inspect the meadow lark's nest
cunningly hidden under a wild rosebush, and then mounted
and went on to the stable, still whistling carelessly.

She turned Pard into the shed where she invariably
left him when she came to the Lazy A, and went on up
the grass-grown path to the house. She had the
preoccupied air of one who meditates deeply upon things
apart; as a matter of fact, she had glanced down the
coulee to its wide-open mouth, and had thrilled briefly
at the wordless beauty of the green spread of the plain
and the hazy blue sweep of the mountains, and had
come suddenly into the poetic mood. She had even
caught a phrase,--"The lazy line of the watchful hills,"
it was,--and she was trying to fit it into a verse, and
to find something beside "rills" that would rhyme with
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