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The November shadows deepened early on the strange, winding, almost subterranean trail, and although when they reached the cottonwood, it was not sundown, they made camp at once. Diana's tent was set up in the sand to the right of the spring. Enoch collected a meager supply of wood and before five o'clock supper had been prepared and eaten.
The chief cared little for life; still, he would unhesitatingly have preferred the most meager existence to a knife in his heart; how much more, then, this craven white man. But the plan had failed because Gledware did not believe death was the other alternative. Never in the remotest way had it occurred to the avenger that Gledware could be spared should he prove false to his oath.
"It's yours," he repeated. "If yer don't want it, heave it overboard yerself or stick it back in the rail. Never touched him you make me sick with yer never touched him!" The door slammed on his scornful retreat; Conroy shuddered and sat up. The iron belaying-pin lay where it had fallen, on his bed, and even in that meager light it carried the traces of its part in the mate's death.
Immediately at her feet lay a deep dell, but little altered by cultivation, and dark with the gloom of a November sunset. Another hill rose opposite to the place where she sat, at no great distance, along whose rugged sides nothing was to be seen but shapeless rocks, and oaks whose stunted growth showed a meager soil.
We were told that they would not grow in New England, but they grew for us and were sweet and plentiful. The waning of the year in a garden is almost the best of it, I think. Spring with its thrill of promise, summer with its fulfilment meager or abundant, according to the season are over. Then comes September and October, the season of cool, even brisk, mornings and mellow afternoons.
"Oh, how exciting!" said Nannie. "Will it make it possible for them to be married any sooner?" "They can't marry on the interest on it," he said, with his meager laugh; "it's only a nest-egg." Mrs. Richie sighed. "Well, of course they must be prudent, but I am sorry to have them wait. It will be some time before David's practice is enough for them to marry on.
Later still, when in the glare of a July sun they drove around a low knoll, dipped into a wide, parched coulee, and then came upon a barren little habitation inclosed in a meager fence of the barbed wire she thought so detestable, she shut her eyes mentally to something she could not quite bring herself to face.
Old squaws, mounted astride of shaggy, meager little ponies, with perhaps one or two snake-eyed children seated behind them, clinging to their tattered blankets; tall lank young men on foot, with bows and arrows in their hands; and girls whose native ugliness not all the charms of glass beads and scarlet cloth could disguise, made up the procession; although here and there was a man who, like our visitor, seemed to hold some rank in this respectable community.
Who among you would not be twenty, when trouble passes like cloud-shadows in April; when the door of the world first opens? Ay, who would not trade the meager pittance, wrested from the grinding years, for one fleet, smiling dream of twenty? "It is all over town, the reply you made to Mrs. Winthrop and that little, sawed-off, witty daughter of hers." "Patty!" "Well, she is sawed-off and witty."
Often even this meager period was divided into a summer and winter term, on the plea that the older children could not be spared from the farms for the whole time or that bad roads and stormy weather prevented the youngest from attending during the winter. Though it seems almost incredible under such conditions, something was nevertheless accomplished.
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