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Out of it all he presently evolved these things: he must go to Cottonwoods; he must bring supplies back to Surprise Valley; he must cultivate the soil and raise corn and stock, and, most imperative of all, he must decide the future of the girl who loved him and whom he loved.
It scarcely needed sight of Lucy under the cottonwoods to still his anger and rouse his regret. Lucy saw him coming, and, as usual, started to avoid meeting him, when sight of the horses, or something else, caused her to come toward him instead. Slone halted. Both Wildfire and Nagger whinnied at sight of the girl.
After his first burst of surprise and rapid calculation Venters lost no time there, but slunk again into the sage on his back trail. With the discovery of Oldring's hidden cattle-range had come enlightenment on several problems. Here the rustler kept his stock, here was Jane Withersteen's red herd; here were the few cattle that had disappeared from the Cottonwoods slopes during the last two years.
And beneath the birches with the hundred eyes looking out from the chalky faced bark, and the poplars laughing and shaking with glee, and the cottonwoods showering down a rain of gold in their death; stood the little pines seeded by the wind, nursed by the shade of the quick growing trees.
The face of his old friend, intense, hard, desperate, was the last thing imaged upon his mind as the room swung round and he dropped limply to the floor. "Just in time," said Fadeaway, bending over the prostrate figure. "Get a move, Bill. I followed him from the cottonwoods and heard his talk. I was waitin' to get him when he come out, but I seen what he was up to and I fixed him."
And the elk-dogs with long ears, and the spotted buffalo, were no longer outside the village in the grass, but inside the village. What men could fight a nation whose warriors were so unfair as all this came to? The tribesmen drew back to the cottonwoods a half mile. "My heart is weak," said their clan leader. "I believe they are going to shoot us all.
At that sight I knew suddenly what I had stumbled upon; and on the impulse I murmured to the Virginian, "You're hanging them to-morrow." He kept his silence. "You may have three guesses," said a man behind me. But I did not need them. And in the recoil of my insight the clump of cottonwoods came into my mind, black and grim. No other trees high enough grew within ten miles.
On the broad steps leading down to the tree-shaded lawn, which sloped gently to the boat landing at the river's edge, still other members of the company were scattered in characteristic attitudes. Across the river, in the shade of the cottonwoods that overhang the bank, a man and a woman in a boat were ostensibly fishing.
Could I walk or ride down into Cottonwoods without my guns? This is a wild time, Jane Withersteen, this year of our Lord eighteen seventy-one." "No time for a woman!" exclaimed Jane, brokenly. "Oh, Lassiter, I feel helpless lost and don't know where to turn. If I am blind then I need some one a friend you, Lassiter more than ever!" "Well, I didn't say nothin' about goin' back on you, did I?"
Instead there were the white of aspens, streaks of branch and slender trunk glistening from the green of leaves, and the darker green of oaks, and through the middle of this forest, from wall to wall, ran a winding line of brilliant green which marked the course of cottonwoods and willows. "There's water here and this is the place for me," said Venters.
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