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Altogether unseen, unsuspected, Lanyard swung the dory into the breach, and drove it seaward with all his might. Swiftly the lagoon was shut out by narrow closing banks. The blue glare died out behind a black profile of rounded dunes. Lanyard turned the bow eastward, rowing broadside to the shore.

The sheep graze in the valleys at some points; in many a little pocket of the dunes I found a potato-patch of about the bigness of a city lot, and on week-days I saw wooden-shod men slowly, slowly gathering in the crop.

His course wound between low cinder dunes which limited their view of the surrounding country. These dunes finally sank down to a black floor as hard as flint with tongues of lava to the left, and to the right the slow descent into the cactus plain. Yaqui was now traveling due west.

"On the third evening, after an exceptionally strong gale had nearly choked, blinded, and overwhelmed us, Carfax did not turn up in camp, and though we searched all the following day we found no trace of him not a vestige; for one of the worst things about the dunes is that when the wind is blowing the spoor is filled up almost immediately with drifting sand; though peculiarly enough a day or two later the spoor will show again, when the light sand has again been blown out.

The action of the tide throws much sand upon some points of the New England coast, as well as upon the Beaches of Long Island and other more southern shores, and here dunes resembling those of Europe are formed. There are also extensive ranges of dunes on the Pacific coast of the United States, and at San Francisco they border some of the streets of the city.

They squatted on their haunches before me, looking at me furtively from their little slits of eyes, muttering to each other afraid. "Master, we fear," they said reluctantly. "He is a great witch, that 'old one' we know him well. Often does he cross the dunes where even we dare not go where no man goes!" "Seek him," I ordered. "No! no!" they said again, "he leaves no spoor and we fear.

The artificial removal of dunes, no longer necessary as a protection, does not appear to have been practiced upon a large scale except in the Netherlands, where the numerous canals furnish an easy and economical means of transporting the sand, and where the construction and maintenance of sea and river dikes, and of causeways and other embankments and fillings, create a great demand for that material.

Oh, I could look death calmly between the eyes as I had watched it creeping toward me on the heated Plains of the Arickaree, and among the cold starved sand dunes of the Cimarron, but to be lauded as a hero here in Springvale the tears would come. Where were Custer, and Moore, and Forsyth, and Pliley, and Stillwell, and Morton, if such as I be called a hero?

They would be going to the harbor or the dunes by the sea; there would be dancing on the grass, and perhaps some would get to fighting about a girl. But he wasn't going to be driven out of the pack like a mangy dog; he didn't care a hang for the whole lot of them! He threw off his apron and established himself on a beer-barrel which stood outside before the gate.

One night I would eat pork and hominy with a rough fellow who was carving a farm out of the forest; and the next I would sit in a fine panelled hall and listen to gentlefolks' speech, and dine off damask and silver. I could not tire of the green forests, or the marshes alive with wild fowl, or the noble orchards and gardens, or even the salty dunes of the Chesapeake shore.