He was popularly nicknamed Morg, and it may be understood that strangers were apt to spell the name Morgue; yet his full name, as he signed it on the day of his wedding and never again, before or after, was Morgan Algernon Valentine. Someone discovered that hidden and forbidden signature and once addressed the rancher as Algie, and the result was a violent accident.
Yet Morgan Valentine was a peaceful man. He was one of those who accomplish romantic results in an everyday manner. Banish his mountains from his horizon, and he would have been a wretched man, and yet when he thought about the mountains at all, it was only to remember the trails that netted them and the sweat of the hard climbs. His labor in life had been noble and was apt to prove enduring. Thirty years before—he and his brother, John, followed the Crane River, where it splits through the higher mountains and comes out upon the lower, rolling hills on the farther side—it occurred to John Valentine, who was the dreamer of the family, that the slopes might not be too steep to preclude cultivation with the plow, and though the regions of the hill crests were a jagged soil, much broken by rocks, there might be enough grass to graze cattle on. Five minutes later he was painting a picture of the house which might be built there—one for Morgan and one for John, on opposite sides of the Crane River. There they could live in eyeshot, each with a broad domain separated by the arrowy, yellow waters of the Crane. There was ample room for both—a hundred thousand acres of hill and valley land.
And still another five minutes found John Valentine already tired of his dream and ready to spur on. But Morgan would not stir. There he resolved to pitch his tent. And though John tried valiantly to dissuade him, the tent was pitched and the two brothers remained. Forthwith, the empire which John had seen, the younger brother proceeded to build. Who are the greater men—the empire seers or the empire makers? At any rate the thing was done; front to front, a couple of miles apart, and with the noisy river splitting the landscape in the middle, rose the two houses. The house of John Valentine was planned as a nobly proportioned structure, and though it had never progressed beyond the columns of the entrance and the first story of the original, it was nevertheless beautiful even in the piece. On the other hand, practical Morgan Valentine built himself a plain shack and gradually extended it. Now it stumbled up the hills on either side, big enough to shelter a whole clan of Valentines and their supporters.
