A great spring gurgled out from under a huge bowlder just behind
the house, and over it Peaceful had built a stone milk house,
where Phoebe spent long hours in cool retirement on churning day,
and where one went to beg good things to eat and to drink. There
was fruit cake always hidden away in stone jars, and cheese, and
buttermilk, and cream.

Peaceful Hart must have had a streak of poetry somewhere hidden
away in his silent soul. He built a pond against the bluff;
hollowed it out from the sand he had once washed for traces of
gold, and let the big spring fill it full and seek an outlet at
the far end, where it slid away under a little stone bridge. He
planted the pond with rainbow trout, and on the margin a rampart
of Lombardy poplars, which grew and grew until they threatened to
reach up and tear ragged holes in the drifting clouds. Their
slender shadows lay, like gigantic fingers, far up the bluff when
the sun sank low in the afternoon.

Behind them grew a small jungle of trees-catalpa and locust among
them--a jungle which surrounded the house, and in summer hid it
from sight entirely.

With the spring creek whispering through the grove and away to
where it was defiled by trampling hoofs in the corrals and
pastures beyond, and with the roses which Phoebe Hart kept abloom
until tho frosts came, and the bees, and humming--birds which
somehow found their way across the parched sagebrush plains and
foregathered there, Peaceful Hart's ranch betrayed his secret
longing for girls, as if he had unconsciously planned it for the