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"I wish he had killed me," said Lemuel from his dust-dry throat. "Oh no; that's foolish," said the elder, with patient, sad kindness. "Who knows whether death is the end of trouble? We must live things down, not die them down." He put his arm caressingly across the boy's shoulder. "I can never live this down," said Lemuel. He added passionately, "I wish I could die!" "No," said Evans.
A trooper spurred down on him, brought him up all standing with an intercepted lance, examined him through puckered eyes, and then, roaring with laughter, picked him up and carried him to Cunningham. "A woman, sahib! By the beard of Abraham, a woman!" "Joanna!" "Ha, sahib! Ha, sahib!" She babbled to him, word overtaking word and choking all together in a dust-dry throat.
This was now dust-dry; but the autumnal rains of bygone seasons had streamed upon it no doubt, with the result that all the rest of the saloon was several inches deep in the same sort of covering.
Carrigan pulled himself a little higher on his pillow and with a new interest scanned the cabin. He had never heard of Boulain women. Yet here was the proof of their existence and of the greatness that ran in the red blood of their veins. The history of the great northland, hidden in the dust-dry tomes and guarded documents of the great company, had always been of absorbing interest to him.
By daylight the fantastic ranges of the interior had disappeared and the last low foothill soon left us to plod on straight across a dust-dry sandy plain with brown withered grass and mesquite bushes, among which panted scores of cattle. Honduras runs so nearly down to a point on its Pacific side that the mountains of both Salvador and Nicaragua stood out plainly to the right and left.
Also it evidently impressed the men, for as they drew rein in front of the store, with its dust-dry shelves and haunting silence, all asked quick questions of the proprietor, a little wizened, gimlet-eyed Mexican who was leaning in the doorway. After glancing over their accoutrements with a nod of understanding, he answered, explaining the reason for the agitation.
There were no sign-posts on this highway of desert space except the many-armed giant cacti, in their furrowed armor set with clusters of needles, like tawny auroras gleaming faintly; no trail on the hard earth under foot, mottled with bunches of sagebrush and sprays of low-lying cacti, all as still as the figures of an inlaid flooring in the violet sheen, with an occasional quick, irregular, shadowy movement when a frightened lizard or a gopher beat a precipitate retreat from the invading thud of hoofs in this sanctuary of dust-dry life.
The herd had somehow changed from plodding animals to one overwhelming purpose that would sweep away anything that came in its path. Two thousand parched throats and dust-dry tongues-and suddenly the smell of water that would go gurgling down two thousand eager gullets, and every intervening second a cursed delay against which the cattle surged blindly.
A few scrawny blackberries and other brambles grew out of its fallen stones; harsh, dust-dry mosses painted its weather-worn walls with their blanched gray and yellow. From its foot, looking out over the valley, we saw the road to the Splügen Pass lying white-hot in the valley; and while we looked, the diligence appeared, and dashed through the dust that rose like a flame before.
Prepared for a dreadful dissolution, utterly unprepared for cool, yielding flesh, I almost dropped where I stood. For her body was neither cold nor warm, neither dust-dry nor moist; neither the skin of the living nor the dead. It was firm, almost stiff, yet not absolutely without a certain hint of flexibility.
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