It was stimulating to the imagination to be brought face to face with an emergency such as this, and to feel that one must handle it with strength and diplomacy and a mildness of procedure that would find favor in the eyes of a girl.
He looked across the waving grass to where the four roomed shack was built upon the four corners of four "eighties" so that four women might live together and yet be said to live upon their own claims.

That was drawing the line pretty fine, of course; finer than the Happy Family would have dared to draw it.

But no one would raise any objection, on account of their being women and timid about living alone.

Andy smiled sympathetically because the four conjunctive corners of the four claims happened to lie upon a bald pinnacle bare of grass or shelter or water, even.

The shack stood bleakly revealed to the four winds--but also it over looked the benchland and the rolling, half-barren land to the west, which comprised Antelope Coulee and Dry Coulee and several other good-for-nothing coulees capable of supporting nothing but coyotes and prairie dogs and gophers.
A mile that way Andy rode, and stopped upon the steep side of a gulch which was an arm of Antelope Coulee.