The shining mountains

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Chapter One

T HERE was great bustle and excitement in the camp on Cherry Creek that June morning, 1874. For three days the nine wagonloads of people that had come across the plains together had rested here on the out" skirts of Denver while the men made inquiries about the country. Now the time was coming when the travelers must separate. Tomorrow the Reed family would go south toward Pike’s Peak where they had heard there was good farm land. Will Yankee would take his family up Clear Creek to the town of Empire. Most of the young bachelors of the party were going with him to find work in the mines. The Crawfords intended to head northwest and keep right on going till they got across the Rocky Mountains to new country on the other side.

The children, bound to make every moment count, had been playing hide-and-seek among the cottonwoods, whoop¬ ing and hollering like a bunch of Apaches. Out of breath, they dropped down on the warm sand to rest and grew suddenly solemn.

“This is the last day we’ll be together,’’ sighed thirteenyear-old Margie Crawford, hunching her knees under her chin and gazing with thoughtful brown eyes at a flock of wind clouds that scurried across the wide prairie sky. “Seems to me it’s been about a year since we left Missouri, though I know it’s only five weeks.’’

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“Wisht we were all going to the same place," said Tom, her brother, halfheartedly rumpling up the fur of Ponto, the yellow shepherd pup. Tom was eleven and growing so fast that even the clothes which had fitted him when they left the farm looked a little skimpy now. His round freckled face was wistful. “Why ’nt the rest of you persuade your folks to come with us over the range?"

“Not me!" declared Stowell Yankee his cousin, sprawling his long length in the shade. “There ain't even a road! 1 don’t see how you can get over."

“There’s the beginnings of a road," argued Tom. “Mr. J. Q. Rollins is buildin’ it. Pa found out about it from one of the workmen who was down for supplies."

“Oh, I guess we’ll get over all right," said Margie. “Even if we have to make a road ourselves. Ma says when, Pa sets out to do a thing he usually does it. And Uncle Henry Crawford and Hute Richardson are going with us to help."

“The Ute Indians live across the range," shivered little Janey Reed. “I’ve heard tell they’re awful fierce. Ain’t you scared?"

“Naw," said Tom. “7 'm not. Just the same we’re goin’ to have our pictures took case we do get scalped. Ma pep suaded Pa, and we’re goin’ to Denver City soon as he gets home."

Pa had gone that morning to Mr. Heywood’s ranch to drive in eight cows and heifers for which he had traded the hack and some extra horses. Hute and Uncle Henry had gone with him.

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“Once when I was little I had my picture taken,” said Margie, “but I can’t remember much about it.”

“Fve had two tintypes made,” remarked Cousin Mary Ann Yankee, wise in experience. She spread her skirts young lady fashion and continued, “They’re awful tiresome. You’ve got to sit and sit and pose and look pretty—”

“Oh, dear,” cried the younger girl, suddenly mindful of her own looks, “has the wind got all the curl out of my hair?” Anxiously she examined a lock. She was accustomed to wear two long braids, but on special occasions like today she roached her front hair back with a comb and let the rest hang loose over her shoulders.

“It is tolerable straight,” admitted her cousin.

“And I did mean to look pretty!” wailed Margie. “I braided it tight as I could last night so it would be frizzed.”

“I don’t reckon the Utes’d want Margie’s hair.” Tom switched the subject back to Indians. “It’s just plain brown. But they’d go for red hair like mine and Danny’s. Uncle Henry said so. We may have to fight the Utes. I’d sooner fight an Indian than a grimly bear. I’ve heard grizzlies are mean as mean! And the mountains are full of lions and carcajous and bobcats.”

Three'year'old Danny, the youngest of the Crawfords, had been playing with Tobe, the big gray striped cat that had come all the way from Missouri in the wagon train. Now he clambered into his sister’s lap and hid his tearful, puckered face in her dress.

“Tom, shame on you!” scolded Margie. “There, Danny, there! Don’t you care. Pa wouldn't let anything hurt us!

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Maybe well see some funny Indian papooses and we might get a bear cub for a pet. I read a story about a man once—”

“What do you s'pose the mountains look like close up?” Janey Reed interrupted curiously, peering through an open" ing in the trees toward the far blue wall of the range.

“Rocky, of course,” said Stowell. “They're called the Rocky Mountains, aren't they?”

“I know a nicer name.” Margie cradled the baby in her arms. Through dreamy eyes she studied the broken outline of the peaks and the mysterious shadow"creased ridges. “Old-time explorers used to call them the Shining Moun" tains. Pa read that in the Missouri Republican .”

“They don't look shiny to me,” said Stowell, sitting up and frowning.

“Well, anyway that's what the newspaper said. It was just quoting these old travelers. They thought the mountain" sides were covered with crystals that sparkled so bright you could see them a long way off. And they believed there was gold and silver and precious stones almost anywhere you looked.”

“Huh! Lots o' folks that came West to find gold got fooled. 'Course there's some places like Empire—"

“I wish you were coming to Empire,” interrupted Mary Ann. “I can't for the life of me see why Uncle Jimmy wants to cross the range. Nobody civilised lives over there!”

“Pa's got a roving disposition,” explained Margie. How many times she had heard Ma say that! “I reckon all us Crawfords have a roving disposition. Honest, I’m dying to see what’s on the other side of those mountains. It was that piece in the Missouri Republican that made us want to come. The reporter was sent out here by the newspaper to learn about the country. He told what those old-time explorers thought and then he told how he climbed the range himself and looked down on the western slope. What he saw must have been grand! Of course, he couldn’t begin to see it all. Pa says likely there are valleys and rivers nobody knows anything about—only the Indians and a few old trappers. I hunted in my geography and the whole north' west comer of Colorado Territory is just a blank space.”

“We aim to find out what’s there,” added Tom. “Then we’ll stake a claim in the best place and build a town all our own. You can come visit us and—”

“Yooo'hoooo!”

That was Ma calling. Tom scrambled to his feet. “Reckon Pa’s back. Come on!”

Margie dumped Danny from her lap and reached her hand out to him. “We’d better run!” she advised. “Ma sounds like hurry !”

The three of them raced for the Crawford tent, the others following. Ma was waiting in her best blue poplin. Aunt Sally Yankee was there, too, and Mrs. Reed. Ma looked flushed and very determined about something. She was a small, plump person with fair girlish face and eyes that could be as merry as Tom’s. Today they weren’t merry. They were dark and full of business.

“I’ve set out a snack to eat, children. As soon as you’ve finished we’re going to town.”

“Where’s Pa?’’

“He hasn’t come yet and I’ve no mind to wait. Now, eat your dinner, for you can’t go unless you do.’’

“If you ask me,’’ said Aunt Sally tartly, “I think this going to town is a lot of nonsense!’’ Aunt Sally was Ma’s older sister and was given to speaking out. “At least, Emerine, you ought to wait till one of the men comes to drive for you.’’

Ma’s head jerked up. “I can drive well enough, Sally. I’ve already hitched the mules to the small wagon, as you see. And I’m sure I can find the picture place. I saw it yesterday when I went with Jimmy to buy provisions.’’

“But in a strange town, and frontier, too!’’ Mrs. Reed’s broad motherly face looked doubtful.

“Pa says Denver’s settled now,’’ declared Tom, trying to cram all his biscuit into his mouth at once.

“I’d wait for Jimmy if it wasn’t for those clouds coming up,’’ said Ma worriedly. “But good pictures can’t be made unless the sun shines.’’

Aunt Sally folded her lips in a prim, severe line. “I’m sure we're going to need every cent we have to keep clothes on our backs, what with setting up housekeeping and all. To my notion it’s a poor time to spend money on pictures.’’

Ma’s chin trembled just a trifle and she said very fast, “No telling when we’ll ever see a settlement again and I want the children’s grandparents to have something to re' member them by!’’ She talked as though they might never come back from over the mountains!

Aunt Sally and Mrs. Reed went off to get dinner for their own children. Danny was the only one of the Crawfords who displayed any interest in eating. Margie and Tom were so excited they had hard work to finish their meal.

“What's it feel like when they take your picture?" mum' bled Tom easing down the last bite with a gulp of milk.

“Hurry, son! Wash your face! Margie, put on your buff muslin and you may wear your gold locket that's in the top of the trunk. Danny child, come here to me."

“What does a picture feel like?" persisted Tom, dipping a finger in the water and wetting a narrow streak on his forehead, then whisking the towel at a great rate so Ma wouldn’t notice.

“Mercy me! We’ve no time to dawdle!" cried Mrs. Crawford. “Your clean shirt, son!"

At last they were ready. Flushed and breathless, they tumbled into the wagon and Margie held Danny on her lap. Ma caught up the reins and flapped them over the dusty backs of the mules.

“Get up, Jack! Get up, Joe!"

“Keep the puppy so he won’t follow, will you, Stowell?" yelled Tom.

The wheels joggled over ruts. The team turned into the main road, heading for town at a lasy trot. Ma flicked them with the whip and they smartened their pace. They soon began to pass log shacks, neat frame houses, and here and there a picket fence. Dogs rushed out to bark at them. The houses became thicker and thicker. Many were of brick, crowned with square cupolas and fronted with hope' ful rows of cottonwood saplings.

Tom and Margie, who had seen nothing but prairie for days upon end, thought Denver City monstrous large. They felt important riding on the high seat with Ma, and sat very straight, gazing in awe at the tall, narrow, brick store build" ings wedged in rows opposite each other. Even the mules stepped cockily, flopping their ears at the carriages that rattled by, and snorting in pretended alarm at a string of freight wagons.

“Easy, boys!” Ma tightened the reins.

Margie's alert eyes peered out from the blue tunnel of her sunbonnet. “Danny,” she exclaimed, “I wish you'd sit still so I can see the sights!”

There were all kinds of people hustling along the board walks: smoothly dressed city folk; miners in wool shirts and heavy boots; mule skinners in sweaty galluses.

“Oh, look, Ma!” cried Tom, pointing. “There's Indians!”

Margie turned to stare at the little band of mild^appearing redskins who trailed down the street. The men rode horses while the squaws traipsed cheerfully behind, leading ponies loaded with buckskin. Some wore bright blankets and oth" ers funny combinations of white people's clothes. Nobody paid them much attention.

“Do you s'pose they're Utes?” whispered Tom.

“If they are they don’t look scary,” said Margie, and found them far less interesting than a hairdresser's sign which advertised, “Chignons, Water Curls, Frisettes, Switches and Curls.” She did wish she had curls!

Ma turned up a side street where the constant prairie wind whisked dust into their faces. “Now remember,” she

The men rode horses while the squaws traipsed cheerfully behind admonished, nodding with such vigor that the brown roses on her small ribboned bonnet jiggled, “when the man takes your pictures, look pleasant!”

“Yes’m!” chorused Margie and Tom, while Danny quit wriggling and clung to his sister, knowing that something very solemn was about to happen and not sure that he’d like it.

“And don’t move an eyelash!”

“Here we are!”

Ma hitched the team in front of a dingy structure that bore a sign in weathered black letters, Clee Morgan, Trader. In one corner of the fly'specked window was the additional information, Benj. Humkins, Ferrotype Artist. Ma mar' shaled her wide'eyed family to the door. With her hand on the knob she gave them final instructions: “Thomas, for pity sake don’t gawp! Margie, take off your sunbonnet and let me see if your hair’s smooth. Danny, you musn’t scratch those mosquito bites. And whatever else you do, children, try to look a credit to the family!”

They stood there half fearful to enter, feeling the pleas' ant warmth of the June sunshine, not knowing what waited for them inside. Ma swung open the door and they edged in. At first they couldn’t see a soul. After the brilliance of out'of'doors the room seemed full of shadows. They stared at the wooden counter and the shelves piled with a hodgepodge of blankets, hides, dusty bolts of calico, shiny trinkets, beads, boxes of cartridge shells, skinning knives, sacks of sugar. Then they saw a gaunt, black'bearded man seated cross-legged on a buffalo robe. He was making some¬ thing from white buckskin, slashing at it with a gleaming knife. Scraps littered the dirty floor.

“Mr. Humkins?" quavered Ma, holding very tightly to Danny.

The man gave them a surly look and jerked his head toward the far end of the room, which was partitioned off by a couple of blankets hung across a pole.

A thin young fellow in threadbare coat immediately ap¬ peared from behind the blankets. “Ah yes, indeed!" He coughed politely, rubbing his hands in the eager manner of one who didn’t have too many customers. “Come in! Come in!"

They stepped into the improvised studio, which had one ordinary window and one window in the roof.

“—a tintype apiece to send to their grandparents," Ma was explaining in a fluttery voice. “And could you make them right away? You see, we’re going across the range."

“Across the range!" No wonder he was surprised. He soon knew they were from Missouri and were camping on Cherry Creek, and he acted so friendly that the family began to feel more at ease. After fussing over a big black box on a stand, he arranged a seat facing it.

“Now!" he said. “Who’s first?"

Since Margie was the oldest, she started for the seat with fast-beating heart. At that moment loud jabbering and grunting could be heard in the trader’s store.

Tom peeked through the crack of the curtains. “It’s those Indians! Great geranium! You reckon they follered us?"

Tom marched manfully to the seat

Margie darted to look.

“Don’t mind them,” said Mr. Humkins. “Just a little band of Arapahoes come to swap.” He lowered his voice confidentially. “They won’t venture in here for they’re afraid of the camera. Morgan’s lived with the Indians so much he’s about like them. He’s very reasonable with the rent. Very! But most peculiar. That’s his boy there—the tall one. Half Indian.”

“Margie—” Ma reminded.

“Yes’m.” The girl sat in the seat and let Mr. Humkins adjust a stiff metal brace to the back of her head. She couldn’t have wriggled if she’d wanted to. The artist stuck his head under a black cloth and popped it out again.

“Now, you must be very still, or the picture will show a girl with half a dozen eyes and any number of fingers. Ah yes, indeed! And you want your mouth to be pretty. Say besom!"

Margie said besom. Mr. Humkins slipped the cap off the round glass front of the camera and began to count. He kept on counting. Margie stared straight ahead, holding her breath. When she’d held it so long she thought she couldn’t stand it, he clapped the cap back on and cried, “There! Who’s next?”

Tom, not to be outdone by a girl, marched manfully to the seat. “Aw,” he said when the ordeal was over, “I couldn’t feel a thing!”

Danny, fortified by the promise of sugar candy when they reached camp, had his turn.

“Please make two of each,” requested Ma.

Mr. Humkins retired to a cubbyhole to do the develop" ing, and the Crawfords settled down to wait. Danny went to sleep. Margie and Tom amused themselves by looking through a stereoscope at a few dogVeared pictures on the table. Tiring of that, they fidgeted and peeped through the curtains.

The Indians wanted to prolong their swapping. They fingered everything. They grunted and chuckled. Grum" pily, the trader hurried the business and ordered them to “Git!” He drove them all away except two halfigrown boys. One was his own son, according to Mr. Humkins; the other was a smaller lad, darker and stockier. The trad" er’s black eyes held an odd gleam as he beckoned them to sit close to him on the floor. They squatted obediently, bending their heads to catch his low gutturals and to see what he was doing with his hands.

The room was close and hot. It smelled unbearably of hides, stale tobacco, and Indians. Ma’s nose wrinkled. “You might open that window, daughter.”

Margie did. A strong gust of wind nearly knocked her down. It whipped across the room, flattening the curtains horizontally, scattering pictures, papers, and scraps of buck" skin in every direction. It caught Margie’s blue sunbonnet from the peg where she had hung it and sent it sailing through the store to lodge by a molasses keg. Shutting the window with a bang she dived after her bonnet. WhachJ she bumped smack into the tall Indian, who had stooped at the same instant to pick up something.

She sat down hard. “Oh!”

The boy rubbed his head. He laughed, a quick flash of white teeth, and handed her the bonnet. Margie, scrambling to her feet, thanked him. She regarded him with in¬ terest. He was jolly even if he was an Indian. His clothes were of buckskin, with long fringe decorating the neck and sleeves of the loose overshirt and dangling from the outside of the leggings. Bright beads gleamed on his moccasins. His dark hair, parted in the middle, was braided in two pigtails like a girl's.

The trader snapped out a sharp question. What a dis¬ agreeable man he was! The boy answered with a nod and a few rapid words. Hastily he tucked something in his belt; then he and his companion vanished through the door.

Margie went back to the little room. By and by Mr. Humkins came out of his cubbyhole with the finished tintypes.

“Did I look like that?” she wondered, gating over Mas arm at the solemn young face printed on the stiff black metal.

Ma hugged her and Tom and Danny all together and got out some money from her bag to pay the artist.

Glancing about for something in which to wrap the pic¬ tures, he spied a scrap of buckskin under the table where the wind had blown it. “Not very clean,” he observed. “Morgan has been doing some figuring on it. But 'tis soft and may serve better than paper.”

The Crawfords lost no time heading home. Before they reached Cherry Creek Pa met them on horseback. He rode up with a great dash and clatter, as straight as a cavalryman in his saddle, his blue eyes a-twinkle. Spy, the black silkyhaired shepherd dog that had been with him all day helping drive the cattle, leaped to greet the mules.

“Pa!” shouted Tom. “We—”

“Oh, Jimmy—” Ma began in a flurry to tell him.

“Aha! Aha!” he cried with mock severity, turning his horse and traveling alongside them. “So the minute Pm gone, you’re off to the city! Hute and Henry were a-mind to send a scouting party after you, but I told them you’d show up come supper time.”

“Jimmy, I had their pictures made!”

“Ay Jonathan!”

Ma had him stop then and there to look at them. He acted as pleased as could be and everyone tried to talk at once.

When they got to camp Ma straightway wrote a letter to her parents in Missouri. She made a neat packet of one set of the pictures, which with the letter she sent to the postoffice by Hute Richardson. The remaining pictures she wrapped in the rest of the buckskin and laid carefully away in the tray of the little tin trunk in the wagon.

The new cows had been put with the other cattle in a near-by corral. Everyone went to bed soon after supper. Once in the night Spy barked, but Pa, supposing she had heard some late traveler along the road, called her to the tent and made her be quiet.

It seemed no time at all till he was shouting, “Roll out, everybody!” Light was beginning to show in the east. Birds were singing in the cottonwoods. Breakfast was cooking over the crackling fires. Before the sun was up the tents were down. Margie climbed into the smaller wagon to pack the bedding.

“Ma! Come quick!” Her startled exclamation brought everybody running. “The trunk’s wide open and our pic' tures are gone!”

Chapter Two

“Gone! The pictures! Nonsense!” Ma climbed into the wagon. There was the trunk wide open and nothing appar' ently disturbed in the neatly packed tray. But the pictures were gone!

“Which one of you young ones has been meddling?” she asked crossly.

“Not me!”

“Nor me!”

“ ’Twasn’t us, Aunt Maggie!”

“Oh, Ma,” cried Margie, “remember how Spy barked in the night? D’you reckon—?”

“I betcha some thief sneaked in and stole ’em!” chattered Tom.

Ma rummaged through the tray. Then she turned every" thing upside down again, bound to unearth the tintypes whether or no.

“Sure you put ’em in here?” Pa wanted to know.

“Of course I did!” Ma was vastly put out.

“Miss anything else?”

Ma shook her head. “I can’t for the life of me see—”

“—why anyone would steal our pictures!” broke in Tom, his hair standing up every direction because Ma had been too busy to make him comb it. “Great geranium! I’d think a thief would ’ve stole the money!”

“Or my gold locket,” nodded Margie.

“Someone's been prowlin' around, all right,” reported Hute. “There's blurry tracks in the sand, but the horses have tromped over 'em. Can't tell nothin’.”

“I'll warrant it was some scoundrel after money and he got the pictures by mistake,” growled Pa. “Just goes to show I ought to paid attention to the dog!”

“No use to waste any more time,” said Aunt Sally brusquely. “What can't be cured must be endured. There’s a heap more important things than pictures. 7 say we’d better be off before the sun gets blistering hot.”

Ma could not be reconciled to the loss of the precious tintypes, and Margie and Tom went about with long faces. But the packing must be finished. There were a thousand things to do! At last the teams were harnessed and the wagons loaded.

“All aboard!” sang out Pa.

The Yankees and Crawfords would travel the same road that day, but the Reeds would turn south. The women kissed each other a tearful good-by. Little Janey clung to Margie desperately.

“I'll miss you dreadful!” she sobbed.

The wagons rumbled out of the camp ground together. Margie looked back at the deserted grove. How lonesome it seemed with the tents down and the fires quenched! At the fork of the roads the Reeds pulled out of the train. “Good'by!” everyone shouted. “Good luck!” The children called and waved till the green^brown prairie rose up between them.

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Tom wanted to ride with Stowell, so Mary Ann climbed into the Crawford wagon, and she and Margie sat holding hands. Now that parting was so near it seemed as if they ought to talk about important things. But they could think of only commonplaces:

“There goes a rabbit.”

“There’s a burrowing owl.”

“We’re coming to a ranch.”

The teams jogged along over a succession of low sandy hills. Mary Ann said, “We ought to have something to remember each other by. You give me a lock of your hair and I’ll give you one of mine, and we’ll keep them always as mementos.”

The exchange was made with the aid of Ma’s scissors. Margie, casting about for a place to put her memento, thought of her sketch book. It was a very special sketch book with a cross'stitched linen cover and a pocket in the back in which she kept her chiefest treasure, a red pencil. Pa and Ma had given her the book and pencil for her last birthday.

“Let’s look at your drawings,” urged Mary Ann.

Tenderly Margie turned the pages. More than half of them were already full. Then she said, “When I learn to paint—”

“You ought to have lessons,” interrupted her cousin with a superior nod. “How are you ever going to learn anything away off with the savages?”

“I don’t know.” Margie’s chin lifted. “But I’ll learn some way.” She didn’t want Mary Ann to see how she had worried over that same question herself. If Pa hadn't taken a notion to come to Colorado Territory, he'd promised she could have painting lessons from Jody Havely in Sedalia. Jody could make all kinds of pictures—peaches spilled on a table, puppies in a basket, purple pansies.

Margie wanted to paint flowers and sunsets. Sometimes she wanted to so badly she ached inside. Giving up those lessons had been the hardest thing about coming West, though she'd resolved not to let Pa and Ma know.

She put her sketch book away in the little blue bag where she kept it. Some day she would paint pictures! Maybe she’d find the shining place where old timers said the rocks were solid gold and silver. Then she'd be rich enough to send and buy a whole bunch of brushes and a color box with all the colors in the rainbow. And if Pa and Ma were willing she could pay her fare back to Missouri where Jody could teach her.

She poked out her head from under the canvas side flap of the wagon to peer at the mountains. Yonder they stretched along the western horizon as far as eye could reach.

“Can you see any shine to them?” she asked earnestly.

“No, I can’t,” said her cousin. “Only those specks of snow on the peaks.”

“Maybe they'll shine on the other side. Anyway I’m going to keep watching.”

That night the travelers made their last camp together in the shadow of Table Mountain near the town of Golden. They could look straight up the wrinkled flanks of the foothills.

“Shucks,” commented Tom, “the mountains ain’t as big as I thought they’d be!”

Hute Richardson roared with laughter. “Wait till you start climbin’ ’em, young fellow,” he advised.

In the morning when it came time to start Ma flung her arms around Aunt Sally and hid her face. Even Aunt Sally cried, though she pretended she’d got ashes in her eyes. No telling when any of them would ever see each other again! Margie hugged Mary Ann tight. In a burst of gen' erosity Stowell gave Tom his Jew’s harp, which had been the envy of the younger boy all the way across the plains. “Here, take it!” he said gruffly. “I’m tired playin’ it any' how.”

The Yankees turned left into the Mount Vernon road, which would bring them to Bergen Park and Empire.

“Good'by!” they called. “Good'by!”

Then the Crawfords drove through Golden, turning right to follow along the base of the range for a mile or so. A lump as big as a walnut lodged in Margie’s throat. Leav' ing the other wagons was almost worse than leaving the farm in Missouri, she reflected. She didn’t mind sleeping on the ground and picking ants out of the sugar if Mary Ann and Janey had to do it too. And she could laugh at prickly pear in her shoes and sun blisters on her nose just to prove to Stowell that she wasn’t any tenderfoot. But now—

The wheels creaked and the harness jangled. Pa drove the mule team to the lighter covered wagon while Uncle Henry drove four horses to the freight outfit. Hute rode Chief, herding the thirty cows and the loose horses behind the plodding procession. Ma and Danny sat on the high board seat with Pa. Tom and Margie perched on the bedroll in the back. There wasn’t much room to tuck in their feet what with being squeezed among sacks of flour and sugar, Missouri hams, the tin trunk, Mas small brown rocking chair, the feather tick, Tobe and Ponto, and whatever else Pa hadn’t been able to get into the freight wagon.

Tom plunk'plunked on the Jew’s harp. Margie glanced at him. Maybe he felt as lonesome as she did. After all, they could have a lot of fun together. And there was the rest of the family and Hute and Uncle Henry. It wasn’t any use to look back and wish for things. She straightened her shoulders resolutely.