"Ain't it though?" cried Mrs. Bates in admiration. "A voice from the tomb, as you might say. He always could put serious things in a humorsome way and not spoil them." She added humbly, "You see he did care for you, up to the last. . . . Now you can say anything you like to me. I know I deserve it."

In a

Mrs. Neville dried her eyes. little while she would be the accustomed symbol of reticence, but for a moment more her soul forgot its decent veils. "I don't want to say anything," she answered. "That doesn't seem to matter. I haven't room in me but for one feeling."

The quiet that fell was like a thanksgiving. Mrs. Bates sighed. "You're letting me off mighty light." She added in a sort of wonder, "Does it mean all that to you, still?"

man

citement hung about them. One expected whiffs of thyme and wild smilax, and to see birds skimming around their feet. The evening star glimmering faintly over their heads was well placed. "Mrs. Neville," the young began. He recognized the presence of his own grandmother, but curbed his surprise and returned to the charge. "Marian has promised to marry me. She-I-we would hate to do anything to hurt you, but we feel—”

Sheer shock arrested him. The redoubtable if friable-looking old lady was standing close in front of him, her hands on Marian's young shoulders, a light in her eyes not so different from that in Marian's own.

"My dear child," she said tenderly, "I hope that you may be as happy . . as I am."

She included the other guest in her gracious smile. Mrs. Bates felt suddenly for a sentimentally-needed handkerchief. Mrs. Neville kissed her granddaughter on both cheeks, then gave her a little push.

"Run and tell Hosea to bring the tea," she said. "He is very late this afternoon."

THE

THE Flathead country-where the Flathead Indians had their reservation before their land was thrown open for settlement in 1910-lies in northwestern Montana, just beyond the Continental Divide. It runs up to the great Flathead Lake, out of which flows one of the tributaries of the Columbia River, and is bounded on the east by the snowcapped Mission Range.

This jagged spur of the Rockies, suggesting the Canadian Rockies in its austere beauty, rises like the steep wall of a tent from the seemingly level valley floor. The lower flanks are pine covered, the gray granite shoulders snow covered even in midsummer, and down the wrinkles flow various small streams.

There is no more beautiful country in America than this Flathead Valley on a bright summer day. The other-worldness of the snow-capped peaks-the whole bulk of the mountains not masked by any intervening foothills; the very practical this-worldness of the level valley and soft, deep soil; the dazzling sunshine and limpid air-all combine into something calculated to fire the heart of any homesteader. You can imagine a pioneer of the old prairieschooner days, working westward down the Jocko River Valley, turning in at what is now the station of Ravalli toward the Jesuit Mission of St. Ignatius, and saying, as Brigham Young said when he looked down on the valley. about Salt Lake, "This is the place!"

Well, the government also thought it was the place, and in 1909 there was a land-drawing and the country was turned over to white settlers. Some 450,000 acres of bench land, valley, and upland range were opened, of which close to a hundred thousand acres were

to be irrigated. The Cœur d'Alene reservation, of which I spoke in an earlier article, was opened at the same time. The drawings were boosted with all the arts of modern publicity; settlers came pouring into the Northwest by the hundred thousand; and, as the Flathead had no forests to be cleared and seemed the more workable of the two, it filled up with a rush.

The government made no definite promise as to when it would deliver water, but the settlers assumed, naturally, that it would be soon. People were just beginning to be enthusiastic, moreover, about "dry farming." They had a notion that here was a magic for all dry-country troubles, and that even if irrigation didn't come at once, they might get along well enough without it. Land that had been "sheeped" over or used for cattle range-stony flats and bare hills, beautiful to look upon when burned a tawny brown in summer, but about as easy to farm as an ash heapwas divided into homesteads and labeled "agricultural land." Families flocked in here, put up their little pine boxes of one-room houses, got a plow and team of horses, and started in to fight a living from the desert.

The water did not come. The building of reservoirs and canals was simply "wished" on the Reclamation Service, while the matter of appropriations for the work was left in the hands of the Indian Commissioner. His annual estimates were based largely on what could be spent on Indian reservations as a whole, and not on what the Reclamation Service needed to complete the work properly. For twelve years construction has dribbled along in this fashion, the inadequate appropriations scattered over

the whole project instead of concentrated to finish up each section as they went along.

And the settlers waited. Where the water came little towns have sprouted and farms are in good shape, although even now only about 50,000 of the 100,000 irrigable acres are actually in use. Where the water did not come a few, with especially good land, succeeded by dry farming in getting a crop once in every three or four years, perhaps. Those who had taken up the stony claims could not do even this. The father plowed the unwilling earth; mother and children picked up stones and piled them in little pyramids over the bare fields. They scratched and waited; threw together a shelter for the horses and themselves; hauled in timber from the distant foothills and built fences; harvested their handful of grain and hay; dug in for the winter, and with the spring went at it again. But it was a losing fight, and most of these little family plants shriveled up and died, like pots of flowers forgotten and left behind when people go away for the summer.

With Moody, project manager for the Reclamation Service, I motored up the valley from St. Ignatius to Flathead Lake, and next day round through the Big Draw and south to St. Ignatius again. We left Poulson, on the shore of the lake, after an early breakfast, and swung to the northwestward through a succession of these abandoned farms.

It was a frosty September morning, bright with the lifting clearness of the three-thousand-foot level, and the little car bored ahead between tremendous smooth, brown hills-an even leonine brown but for the stubble of pines in their folds and along the summits, and so majestically sloped and seemingly smooth that all one could think of was how enchanting it would be to shoot down them in winter on skiis! Great country to run cattle in before the days of fences, or to use as the stage for some movie battle, but the end of the world as a place in which to make a living by making things grow.

One after another we passed themthe empty pine shack with broken windows, the bit of tumble-down fence, the