Old White Slides, a mountain scarred by avalanche, towered with bleak rocky peak above the valley, sheltering it from the north.
A girl rode along the slope, with gaze on the sweep and range and color of the mountain fastness that was her home.

She followed an old trail which led to a bluff overlooking an arm of the valley.

Once it had been a familiar lookout for her, but she had not visited the place of late.
It was associated with serious hours of her life.

Here seven years before, when she was twelve, she had made a hard choice to please her guardian--the old rancher whom she loved and called father, who had indeed been a father to her.

That choice had been to go to school in Denver.