The Fighting Shepherdess

It was spring. The sagebrush had turned from gray to green and the delicate pink of the rock roses showed here and there on the hillsides. The crisp rattle of cottonwood leaves was heard when the wind stirred through the gulches, and along the water course the drooping plumes of the willows were pale green and tender. It was the season of hope, of energy revived and new ambitions--the months of rejuvenation, when the blood runs faster and the heart beats higher.

But, alas, the joyful finger of spring touched the citizens of Prouty lightly. Worn out and jaded with the strain of a hard winter and waiting for something to happen, they did not feel their pulses greatly accelerated by mere sunshine. It took more than a rock rose and a pussy willow to color the world for them. June might as well be January, if one is financially embarrassed.

The suspicion was becoming a private conviction that when Prouty acquired anything beyond a blacksmith shop and a general merchandise store it got more than it needed. Conceived and born in windy optimism, it had no stamina. The least observant could see that, like a fiddler crab's, the progress of the town was backward. But these truths were admitted only in moments of drunken candor or deepest depression, for to hint that Prouty had no future was as treasonable as criticising the government in a crisis. So the citizens went on boasting with dogged cheerfulness and tried to unload their holdings on any chance stranger.

A trickle of water came through the ditch that had been scratched in the earth from the mountains to some three miles beyond Prouty. Nearly every head-gate the length of it had been the scene of a bloody battle where the ranchers fought each other with irrigating shovels for their rights. And, after all, it was seldom worth the gore and effort, for the trickle generally stopped altogether in August when they needed it. If the flow did not stop at the intake it broke out somewhere below and flooded somebody. If the sides did not give way because of the moisture loosening the soil, the rats and prairie dogs conspired to ruin Prouty by tunneling into the banks. And if by a miracle "the bone and sinew" of the community raised one cutting of alfalfa, the proceeds went to the Security State Bank, or Abram Pantin, to keep up their 12 per cent. interest.

When the route to the Coast was shortened by one of the state's railroads and Prouty found itself on the cutoff, it was delirious with joy, but it regained its balance when the fast trains not only did not stop, but seemed to speed up instead of slackening; while the local which brought any prospective investor deposited him in a frame of mind which was such that it was seldom possible to remove his prejudice against the country.