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Along the spring-fed creek the frogs croaked a tuneless medley before him, and, like the crickets, stopped abruptly and waited in absolute silence to take up their night chant again behind him. His horse stepped softly in the deep sand of the trail, and, when he found that his rider refused to let him stop at the stable-door, shook his head in mute displeasure, and went quietly on.
A silent rage burned suddenly through all his veins which was well, since the cold of that spring-fed river had already begun to finger stealthily about his heart. A delicate little pale-blue butterfly, like a periwinkle-petal come to life, fluttered over Barnes's grim, upturned face, and went dancing gaily out across the shining water, joyous in the sun.
They looked cooler, the distant wooded hills; for all the shimmering heat waves that danced and eddied in the gaps and glanced, shaft-like, from the brittle needles of the pines which sentineled the ridges, they hinted at depths to which the sun's rays could not penetrate; they hinted at chasms padded with moss, shadowed and dim beneath chapel arches of spruce and hemlock, even chilly with the spray of spring-fed brooks that brawled in miniature rocky canyons.
It was like a bit of desert dropped by mistake among the green farms and spring-fed forests that covered the rest of the river uplands. No sentinel was ever more steadfast to his duty in time of war and disorder than Mrs. Meeker, as she sat by the front window, from which she could see some distance either way along the crooked road.
This edifice stood on a low knoll from the heart of which issued a small spring-fed stream which had cut itself a deep ditch or gully down to the general level; and on the slope opposite to where the stream went out was a narrow path where the sheep ran up. The little eminence, with its structures, was a shanty acropolis to a universe otherwise unimproved.
I crawled on hands and knees to the sound of silver-trickling water and found a little spring-fed stream. Prone, weight on elbows, I drank heavily of its perfect blackness. It was icy, talkative, minutely alive. The older presently gave a perfunctory "alors"; we got up; I hoisted my suspicious utterances upon my shoulder, which recognized the renewal of hostilities with a neuralgic throb.
The water was of something like the consistency of pea-soup, but no spring-fed mountain-rill ever tasted sweeter or more grateful to a thirsty traveller than this muddy fluid to the palates of the Mount Desolation pack.
The big cook unerringly picked the route of least resistance to the point from which the first circle would be launched, striking every wash and coulee at a place where a crossing was possible. Shortly before noon the wagon was halted in a broad bottom threaded by a tiny spring-fed stream.
It was almost circular and nearly a mile in diameter. To the north its shore blended with the heights that led to the peaks; heights clad with a rugged growth of pines and firs that extended toward the timber line. There was nothing gentle or park-like about the Blue Lake. Its chilly depths were spring-fed, and sheltered trout that were far from logy.
Down came Gulo in that grim silence which was, except for his domestic arguments, characteristic of the beast, and trotted to a pool hard by. The pool was spring-fed, and covered, as to every dead leaf and stone, with fine green moss of incomparable softness.
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