CHAPTER I
MARTHA BAINBRIDGE rose stiffly from the camp fire after carefully raking out the live coals and setting the Dutch oven with the raised loaves on its three little legs. With a practiced hand she heaped coals on the cover and stepped back from the fire. She was alone, and for the moment her whole being sagged with the accumulated weariness of six months on the plains. Then she turned resolutely, squared the drooping shoulders, and lifting her face to the sky, drew in a long breath of the bracing air of a late Oregon fall, fast verging into winter.
With shining eyes she looked far down the valley from the little natural clearing where she stood to the placid blue of the Willamette, flowing smoothly
northward, the sheer descents of its western bank a riot of scarlet and gold from the frost-touched dogwoods and vine maples, with here and there the subdued note of somber firs, almost black in the hard, clear November sunlight.
She turned slowly northward. The Clackamas, a smaller river, steely blue in the broad shallows and molten silver in its riffles, flowed into the Willamette from the east, a mile and a half below. Beyond stretched lowlands, lush with grass, hemmed in by the ragged Cascade Mountain Range shifting from north to east.
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