CHAPTER III
Hilma Ring was not emotional. The petty reflexes of thought and action that come to women of finer fiber, of more pampered lives—to your idle beauty of the flowered boudoir—were unknown to her. Impulse and emotion were with her primitive, direct, unaffected by any reaction of sensitive nerves. The springs of her life were elemental as that secret force which each year covers the face of the Big Country with lusty verdure. When, after that last shot and that derisive farewell by the one coolly daring it, Hilma turned to ride back to her house she was conscious of but a single response to the events of the past few moments, cold anger. Anger at the impudent stranger who had driven off the yearlings in the face of her fire; anger more particularly at herself. Why had her hand tipped up the head on the barrel's end that instant her finger pulled the
