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Of all the confused impressions that crowded Nan's memory after the wild night on Music Mountain, the most vivid was that of a noticeably light-stepping and not ungraceful fat man advancing, hat in hand, to greet her as she stood with de Spain, weary and bedraggled in the aspen grove.
'Rastus, at the stables, raised a shout and broke for the store on the run. "Hyer's Miss Phyl done come home." At his call light-stepping dusty men poured from the building like seeds from a squeezed orange. There was a rush for the girl. She was lifted from her saddle and carried in triumph to the porch. Jim Sanderson came running from the cellar in the rear and buried her in his arms.
He was a berry-brown youth, in the trappings of the range-rider, a little thin and stringy, perhaps, but well-poised and light-stepping. With one swift glance the fat man swept his visitor from head to foot and liked what he saw. The lean face was tanned, the jaw firm, the eye direct and steady. There was no need to tell this man to snap up his head.
It was tiresome the way people could grow ugly all in a moment and in the wrong moment too! All this happened during the two or three minutes after the light-stepping visitor had come into the bar; and now this person tapped twice or thrice on the counter.
How free are their souls, what nobility shines in the eyes of these men, light-stepping to their doom, immortally serene, these martyrs, witnesses to an ideal not less pure, not less lofty than those other two for which saint and reformer died!
Then, last of all, came the Keepers of the Eastern Gate, the flower of the warriors of the Long House the Mohawks. They passed in the barbaric magnificence of paint and feather and shining steel, a hundred lithe, light-stepping warriors, rifles swinging a-trail, and gorgeous beaded sporrans tossing at every stride.
He had just come from a call at the bedside of Jerry Durand and he felt a healthy respect for the man who could do what this light-stepping young fellow had done to the champion rough-houser of New York. The story Jerry had told was of an assault from behind with a club, but this Collins did not accept at par.
The white bull no longer white now, but black and silver in the moonlight stood for some seconds quite motionless, his head low, his broad and massive antlers thrust forward, his feet planted firmly and apart. Ominous in his stillness, he waited till his light-stepping and debonair adversary was within twenty feet of him.
And the ride on her fast light-stepping little mare, alone and unattended, through the fresh-smelling leafy lanes into unexplored country, seemed just what she wanted at the moment.
"This steering by the nose, Magnet, may do well enough for an Indian, but your thoroughbred knows the virtue of the needle," said the uncle, as he trudged at the heels of the light-stepping Tuscarora. "America would never have been discovered, take my word for it, if Columbus had been nothing but nostrils. Friend Arrowhead, didst ever see a machine like this?"
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