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But, for the most, Lad was close at their sides, during these two wonderful weeks. And he was very happy. Once, during a solitary ramble, before the humans had awakened in the morning, Lad caught an odd scent; and followed it for a quarter mile down the mountainside. It waxed stronger and ranker. At last, a turn around a high boulder brought him face to face with its source.
Several guns banged and the bullets pattered into the logs. There was no sign of life in the valley beyond this scattering volley, however. Ward and the girl were gone. The dead Indian and dog were partly in view among the weeds beside the lick-block. The gown of the dead woman made a little patch of melancholy color against the green of the grass and ranker ground growth.
Once in the year, on San Carlos' Day, Mass is sung in the only habitable corner of the ruin; the Indians and the natives gather from all quarters, and light candles among the graves, and mourn and mourn and make a strange picture of the place; then they go their way, and the owl returns, and the weeds grow ranker, and every hour there is a straining among the weakened joists, and a creaking and a crumbling in many a nook and corner; and so the finest historical relic in the land is suffered to fall into decay.
Ah, no! she adopts the calamity at once into her system, and is just as well pleased, for aught we can see, with the tuft of ranker vegetation that grew out of Zenobia's heart, as with all the beauty which has bequeathed us no earthly representative except in this crop of weeds. It is because the spirit is inestimable that the lifeless body is so little valued.
It is strange indeed, it is woeful, it is scarcely comprehensible, if we come to think of it as men, and not as machines, that, after all the progress of civilisation, it should be so easy for a little official talk, a few lines on a sheet of paper, to set a terrible engine to work, which without any trouble on our part will slay us ten thousand men, and ruin who can say how many thousand of families; and it lies light enough on the conscience of ALL of us; while, if it is a question of striking a blow at grievous and crushing evils which lie at our own doors, evils which every thoughtful man feels and laments, and for which we alone are responsible, not only is there no national machinery for dealing with them, though they grow ranker and ranker every year, but any hint that such a thing may be possible is received with laughter or with terror, or with severe and heavy blame.
Slavens' absence, and she declared to herself that she would turn Comanche over, like a stone in the meadow of which the philosopher wrote, and bare all its creeping secrets to the healthy sun, but that she would find him and clear away the unjust suspicions which she knew were growing ranker in that little colony hour by hour.
Walk along a strand, strange land, come to a city gate, sentry there, old ranker too, old Tweedy's big moustaches, leaning on a long kind of a spear. Wander through awned streets. Turbaned faces going by. Dark caves of carpet shops, big man, Turko the terrible, seated crosslegged, smoking a coiled pipe. Cries of sellers in the streets. Drink water scented with fennel, sherbet.
This was the preparatory fumigation, in order to remove the ranker seeds of plague, after which the milder symptoms will of themselves vanish in the pure air of the place. Several times a day we are stunned and overwhelmed with the cracked brays of three discordant trumpets, as grating and doleful as the last gasps of a dying donkey.
Some varieties perish, but the ranker, hardier kinds, like the northern spy, the greening, or the black apple, or the russet, or the pinnock, how they ripen and grow in grace, how the green becomes gold, and the bitter becomes sweet! As the supply in the bins and barrels gets low and spring approaches, the buried treasures in the garden are remembered.
The civilized philanthropist wreaks upon his fellow creatures a ranker philanthropy, the civilized scoundrel a sturdier rascality. And splendid triumph of enlightenment! the two characters are, in civilisation, commonly combined in one person. I know of no savage custom or habit of thought which has not its mate in civilized countries.
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