THE JOY OF ANTICIPATION


Elk Creek Valley was a blue and golden place that mid-summer morning in
the Big Horn Country. It seemed like a joyous secret tucked away among the
mountains, whose hazy, far-away summits were as blue as the sky above
them. The lower ranges, too, were blue from purple haze and gray-green
sagebrush, while the bare, brown foot-hills tumbling about their feet were
golden in the sunlight. Blue lupines and great spikes of mountain larkspur
made of the Valley itself a garden which sloped gently to the creek, and
lost itself in a maze of quaking-asps and cottonwoods. As for the creek