rather than understood. He sat in awkward silence. Inez put her hand on
his knee and looked up at him. Her face was tragically beautiful in the
moonlight.

"Douglas, do you ever stop to think how beautiful Lost Chief country is?"

"Not often," admitted Doug.

Inez went on. "Peter Knight's been all over the United States and he says
there's no place passes it in beauty. Sometimes when I see the valley
looking like it does to-night, I cry. Doug, you are more promising than
these other kids. When you ride round on the range try to keep your mind
a little bit off cattle and horses and women and keep it on that line of
the Forest Reserve the way it looks to-night. Or the way this yellow wall
looks in the snow and the sunrise on it. And then, when you get that
habit, tell Judith about it and get her to thinking the same way. Beauty
can't live on rot, Douglas. I know that now. I don't care what Charleton
quotes."

"Inez," asked Douglas huskily, "why don't you burn that old cabin up?"

"It's too late," replied Inez shortly; and she turned on her heel and
left him.

Douglas rode thoughtfully along the home trail. He was angry with Peter
and sorry for Inez, and he missed his mother as he never had missed her
before. He had been only a baby at the time of her death. This was the
first time that he had been told of the type of woman she was though he
had heard much of his mother's father, old Bill Douglas. He went to bed
that night with an entirely new set of thoughts.