She had not even lived in any of the miserable little towns that flourish in the wildest of the West, and not within several hundred miles of a city.

Their nearest neighbors in one direction had been forty miles away, she said, and said it as if that were an everyday distance for a neighbor to live.
Mail?
They had had a letter once that she could remember, when she was a little girl.

It was just a few lines in pencil to say that her mother's father had died.

He had been killed in an accident of some sort, working in the city where he lived.

Her mother had kept the letter and cried over it till almost all the pencil marks were gone.
No, they had no mail on the mountain where their homestead was.
Yes, her father went there first because he thought he had discovered gold, but it turned out to be a mistake; so, as they had no other place to go to, and no money to go with, they had just stayed there; and her father and brothers had been cow-punchers, but she and her mother had scarcely ever gone away from home.