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It is nothing to go down these coulées; one need only let oneself glide down, but it is more difficult to get up again; one has to scramble up by catching hold of the hanging branches of the trees, and sometimes on all fours, by sheer strength. A whole mortal hour passed and he did not come, nothing moved in the brushwood. The captain's wife began to grow impatient; what could he be doing?

They had been over rough spots, and had climbed in and out of deep coulees, but never had they travelled a rougher trail than that. "My God! boys, look down there!" Pink cried, when yet fifty perpendicular feet lay between them and the level below. They looked, and drew breath sharply.

He calculated they had covered five miles between the two coulées, and that it would be about twenty-five miles all told back to their own camping-place. Supposing the boy to have averaged three miles an hour, he would now be some twelve miles away, and if he kept walking, Garth, at his present pace, should come upon him in an hour and a half's riding.

And his own life was to be uselessly endangered. Already, out upon the prairie, Indian scouts were keeping watch. He might be able, though alone and unarmed, to pass them and reach the coulées beyond. But he would only fall into the murderous clutches of the savages swarming there. David Bond smiled when they argued.

"It's level up there. Why couldn't they have built it along the edge?" The man smiled: "And bridged all those ravines!" he pointed to gaps and notches in the level sky-line where the mouths of creek beds and coulees flashed glimpses of far mountains. "Each one of those ravines would have meant a trestle and trestles run into big money."

The broad, fat acres were almost level. There was no waste land, no coulées, no barren hills to discount its value. Every foot of it could be irrigated, and most of it was actually irrigated and cultivated. Dunne's eye followed the lines of the ditches, marked by margins of green willows. They cut through the fields of wheat, of oats, of alfalfa, timothy, and red clover.

Let's get out of this." "Where'll we go?" "Back to my native town-up among the Wisconsin hills and coulees. Go anywhere, so that we escape this pressure-it's killing me. Let's go to Bluff Siding for a year. It will do me good-may bring me back to life. I can do enough special work to pay our grocery bill; and the Merrill place-so Jack tells me-is empty.

The train wound in and out of coulees, through romantic-looking ravines, and finally out upon the flat grass-country where the Indians came first into view of the supposedly frightened pilgrims. Helen and Jennie, as well as Ruth herself, in the gingham and sunbonnets of the far West of that earlier day, added to the crowd of emigrants riding in the wagons.

The country people sell the wood; they send it down the slopes, which are called coulees, locally, and which lead down to the plain, and there they stack it into piles, which they sell thrice a year to the wood merchants. The spot where this market is held in indicated by two small houses by the side of the highroad, which serve for public houses.

The captain had gone down there by way of one of these coulees. He had been gone about half an hour, and we were on the lookout at the top of the ravine, when we heard a shot. The captain had ordered us not to stir, and only to come to him when we heard him blow his trumpet.