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With her, untruthfulness had always been a difficult matter. To Billy it was impossible. She could see the cloud-drift in his eyes deepening and his face hardening in the way she knew so well when he was vexed. "Say, Saxon, you ain't... you ain't... sellin' your work?"
Trails spidered up its broken steep, and were lost in the cloud-drift or dipped out of sight over the edge of the timbered mesa. "We would go over the trail to hunt," said Moke-icha. "There were no buffaloes, but blacktail and mule deer that fattened on the bunch grass, and bands of pronghorn flashing their white rumps. Quail ran in droves and rose among the mesas like young thunder.
'And beyond the Wild Wood again? he asked: 'Where it's all blue and dim, and one sees what may be hills or perhaps they mayn't, and something like the smoke of towns, or is it only cloud-drift? 'Beyond the Wild Wood comes the Wide World, said the Rat. 'And that's something that doesn't matter, either to you or me.
"D'you hear anything, sir?" The boy made no reply, listening, listening. Had he made a mistake? was it only the swish of waters under the keel? ... No! "There! there, in front!" This time there was no mistaking it the noise of a boat's bow smashing into seas. Reuben brought his fist down with a thump. "To the tick!" Just then the cloud-drift parted. Through tatters of mist the moon shone down.
By the time we were done eating, the gray light of a bedraggled morning revealed tiny lakes in every hollow, and each coulée and washout was a miniature torrent of muddy water with a promise of more to come in the murky cloud-drift that overcast the sky.
As he spoke the young man still holding to his cloak he cast him off, and struck him: then, wildly hurried out into the night air where the wind was blowing, the snow falling, the cloud-drift sweeping on, the moon dimly shining; and where, blowing in the wind, falling with the snow, drifting with the clouds, shining in the moonlight, and heavily looming in the darkness, were the Phantom's words, "The gift that I have given, you shall give again, go where you will!"
She was a dark and secret ship: not a light save for the glare of the binnacle-lamp; the only sound the creak of a block, the mutter of canvas, and the chatter of waters. It was a dirty night, a wet mist blowing landward. There was no moon; only here and there a star pierced the cloud-drift. The boy groped his way forward. In the bows a dark lantern on the deck shone on a group of sea-boots.
That consumed, he went out on the little gallery; but he could see nothing but eddying clouds driving headlong by, and the dim outlines of the nearer airships. Only at rare intervals could he get a glimpse of grey sea through the pouring cloud-drift.
The spell of summer weather had passed from the islands, and in its wake the wind blew keenly from the north, and the grey cloud-drift hurried low overhead. All colour had died out of land and sea; the hills looked naked and the waters cold. And Vandrad, the sea-rover, had gone with the sunshine had gone, never so Osla said to herself, to return again.
"And beyond the Wild Wood again?" he asked; "where it's all blue and dim, and one sees what may be hills or perhaps they mayn't, and something like the smoke of towns, or is it only cloud-drift?" "Beyond the Wild Wood comes the Wide World," said the Rat. "And that's something that doesn't matter, either to you or me.
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