The result of this quarrel was that Justin was banished temporarily from the ranch, though it was not assigned as the reason for his exile. Fogg had been forced to take a flock of sheep in payment for a debt owed him by a sheepman. The sheep were already in Paradise Valley, and were to be sent at once into the mountains. Davison ordered Justin to take charge of these sheep, and hurried shepherd and flock into the hills, while Lucy was temporarily away from home. Justin could not rebel against this order except mentally, if he wished to remain in Davison’s employment and retain, or regain, his good-will.

Before setting forth he left a letter for Lucy with Pearl Newcome, and was sure she would get it. Yet he departed from the ranch with a heavy heart; and as he went on his way he questioned why he and not another had been selected for this life of lonely exile in the mountains. He was almost sure it was because of his trouble with Ben.

Justin was assisted in driving the sheep to the high altitudes, where they were to graze until cold weather would make it advisable to bring them into the lower foot-hills. A sufficient supply of food for a month or more was taken along, and he was helped in the work of erecting a brush-and-pole house.

He was well up among the pines and aspens, where the nights are always cool, with often a sharp frost even in mid-summer. Snow banks were in sight, and here and there streams and small lakes of the purest ice water. Occasionally a lordly elk crashed through a grove, or came out with such suddenness on the lonely herder and his woolly charges that it whistled and fled in astonishment. Black-tailed deer passed frequently on the slopes, and now and then Justin came upon the track of a bear. The only animals he could not love were the worthless coyotes, that made life a burden to him and murdered sleep in their efforts to slay the sheep.

Of all, the sheep were the most vexatious and stupid, having no originality of impulse, and being maddeningly, monotonously alike. When hungry, in the earlier part of the day, they exhausted his strength and that of his dog, as he followed them, while they swarmed everywhere, nibbling, nibbling, with a continual, nerve-racking “baa-a-a! baa-a-a!” Justin could not wonder that sheep-herders often go mad. The sheep were more than two thousand in number; and to keep anything like a count of them, so that he might be sure that the flock was not being devastated by the sly coyotes, was trying work.

But there were other times when he was given hours of lazy ease, when he could lie with the faithful dog on the cool grass and look up into the cool sky; could listen to the foaming plunge of the mountain stream, to the fluttered whisperings of the aspens and the meanings of the pines, and could watch the flirting flight of the magpies, or the gambolings of playful deer.

So Justin had much opportunity for thought; and his thoughts and imaginings ran wide and far, with Lucy Davison and Doctor Clayton not very far from both center and periphery wherever they ran or flew. That he had been forced to come away without a parting word with Lucy troubled him sorely.

He had his mother’s little Bible with him, containing the wisp of brown hair, and the written flyleaf:

“Justin, my baby-boy, is now six months old. May God bless and preserve him and may he become a good man.”

He read in it much, in his leisure; and studied that writing many, many times, thinking of his mother, and wondering about his father. And he questioned as to what his life probably would have been if his mother had lived, or if he had known of his father. Yet he was very well satisfied to have it as it had been ordered. It had brought to him Lucy Davison; and he might have missed her, if fate had not led him to Paradise Valley and kept him there.

He was quite sure that no father could have done more for him than Clayton, nor loved him with a more unselfish love. To the missionary preacher, Peter Wingate, and to Curtis Clayton, he acknowledged that he owed all he was or could ever be. He thought very lovingly of Clayton, as he lay on the cool slopes looking into the cool sky.

And, indeed, the lonely doctor had been wondrously kind to the boy whose life and future had been so strangely committed to his keeping. Without intending anything in particular beyond the impartation of knowledge, he had rounded, on the foundation laid by Peter Wingate, a structure of character that combined singular sweetness with great nobility and strength, for Justin had inherited from his mother certain qualities of sturdy resolution which Clayton himself lacked. The one great blemish, or fault, was a quick and inflammable temper, that almost resisted control.

Utterly unaware of the fact himself, as he lay thus among his sheep, while his thoughts ranged far and wide, Justin was like that ruddy David, youthful son of Jesse, with whose life story, told in his mother’s little Bible, he was so familiar, or like Saul in his boyhood days. His lusty youth, his length of limb, his shapely head covered with its heavy masses of hair, his tanned strong face with its kindly, clear-cut profile, and his steady unwinking eyes that looked into the blue skies with color as blue, all spoke of unrecognized power.

He dreamed of the future, as well as of the past, building cloud castles as unsubstantial as the changing clouds that floated above him. He knew that many of them were but dreams. Others it seemed to him might be made to come true, with Lucy Davison to help him. He did not intend to remain either cowboy or sheep-herder, he was sure of that; and he did not think he would care to become a doctor, like Clayton. He would like to accomplish great things; yet if he could not, he would like to accomplish the small things possible to him in a manner that should be great. Not for his own sake—he felt sure it was not for his own sake—but for Lucy and Clayton! He wanted to be worthy of them both.

It must be confessed that his wandering thoughts were chiefly occupied with Lucy Davison. He delighted to recall those happy moments under the cottonwoods. Always in his dreams she was true to him, as he was to her; and she was longing for his letters, as he was for hers.

Naturally, other things and people were often in Justin’s thoughts. He thought of Philip Davison, of Ben, with whom he had quarreled, and of Mary Jasper and her father. With a keen sense of sympathy he pictured Sloan Jasper plodding his slow rounds, trying to satisfy with his horses and his cows that desire for loving companionship which only the presence of his daughter could satisfy. He marveled that Mary could leave her father to that life of loneliness for even the gayeties of Denver. And thinking thus, he pitied Mary.

Often Justin lay under the night sky, rolled in his blankets, when the coyotes were most annoying, ready to leap up at the first alarm given by the dog. He carried a revolver for use in defending the sheep against the coyotes. This was a case in which, as he knew, even Curtis Clayton would approve of slaying. He began to see clearly, too, in this warfare with the coyotes, that nature, instead of being uniformly kind, as Clayton liked to think, is often pitilessly cruel, and seems to be in a state of armed combat in which there is never the flutter of the white flag of truce.

It was the visualizing to him of that age-old conflict in which only the fittest survive. As he looked out upon this warring world, all the animals, with few exceptions, seemed to be trying to devour all the others. The coyotes slew the sheep, the mountain lions pulled down the deer, the wild cats devoured the birds, and for all the fluttering, flying insect life the birds made of the glorious turquoise skies an endless hell of fear.

Often there came to Justin under the night sky rare glimpses of the wild life of the mountains. Playful antelopes gamboled by, all unconscious of his presence, frisking and leaping in the light of early morning, or scampering in wild rushes of fright when they discovered his presence or the dog gave tongue; bucks clattered at each other with antlered horns, or called across the empty spaces; wild cat and cougar leaped the rocks with padded footfalls and occasionally pierced the still air with screams as startling in their suddenness as the staccato, Indian-like clamor of the coyotes. Always wild cat, cougar and coyote brought Justin from beneath his blankets with every sense alert, and sent the dog scurrying into the gloom in the direction of the sound.

Clayton’s habits of study and writing had not been lost on Justin, and now and then he tried to set down in his little note book some description of the things that moved him. He composed letters, too, to Lucy, many letters which he never meant to send. In them he told her of his life with the sheep, and of how much he loved her. Often these letters were composed, but not written at all.

In one of those letters to Lucy which were not intended to be sent he incorporated some of his thoughts concerning the farmers of the valley, together with a bit of verse. The old hope of Peter Wingate had come back to him for the moment, and he saw the valley as Wingate saw it in his dream of the future:

Justin got no further. The impossibility of the fulfillment of that dream had come to him as he sought to picture the present.

When the driver of the “grub wagon” came with supplies and the news of the ranch, he brought a letter from Lucy; and he took away a letter for her, when he departed. The news from home was cheering. Outwardly at least matters had not changed there. No one had come, and no one had gone, and the usual work was going on.

More than once the driver came, and each time Justin saw him depart with unspoken longing. He would have given much to be privileged to go back with him. Yet Justin was not and had not been lonely in the ordinary meaning of that word; he was lonely for the companionship of Lucy Davison, for the glance of her brown eyes, for the music of her words; but, possessing that inner light of the mind in which Clayton believed, it brightened his isolation as with a sacred fire, filled the wooded slopes and craggy heights with life and beauty, and suggested deep thoughts and deeper imaginings.

Filled with dreams and work, with desire and accomplishment, the slow months rolled by. With the descent of the snow-line on the high peaks the sheep were driven into the foot-hills, and then on down into the plain itself, where not only grass, but the various sages—black, white, salt and bud sage—together with shad-scale and browse, furnished an abundance of the food they liked.

Then they were taken away, their summer herding having been a good investment for Fogg; and Justin returned to Paradise Valley, clear-eyed, sturdy, and handsomer even than before. He had learned well the to him necessary lesson of patience, and had tasted the joy of duty well done. More than all, he had begun to find himself, and to know that childhood and youth had fallen from him, and that he was a man.