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The sparrows twittered in the treetops as if the branches were green with leaves. To Cyrus, however, it was a world of gloom. Upstairs Huldah was singing singing! and it was Thanksgiving. He could hear her feet patter, patter on the floor above, and the sound had a cheery self-reliance that was maddening. Huldah was happy, evidently and it was Thanksgiving!
Dorothy giggled nervously, then seized hold of a small tree, for the whole forest was rocking. "How now!" gasped the Knight. There was a terrific quake that threw Sir Hokus on his face and sent every hair in the lion's mane on end, and then a great foot came crashing down through the treetops not three paces from the little party.
"Neither, I reckon, Steve. I think it was only the wind rising, and making a moaning sound among some treetops. I've heard it call out in a way to make you think some poor fellow had been caught under a falling tree, and was being slowly crushed to death. Yes, there it goes again, you notice." "But doesn't it sound spooky, though?" ventured Steve, looking hastily over his right shoulder for luck.
The silence of the evening was broken only by the faint sobbing of the wind in the treetops, and the breaking of dried twigs under their feet. They were both listening intently they scarcely knew for what. The far-away rumble of a train, the barking of a dog, the scurrying of a rabbit across the path these sounds came and passed nothing else. They neared the edge of the plantation.
For now the winds came too often tainted with the smoke of burning pines. The blue haze of the far distance deepened with the thickening air. Four times in the last ten days he had swung the pointer over the mapped table and sighted it upon brown puffballs that rose over the treetops the first betraying marks of the licking flames below.
The autumn birds were singing; the autumn flowers were blooming; yellow golden rod and scarlet sumach glowed in the corners of the fences; locusts chirped in treetops; grasshoppers stridulated in the meadows, one or two of them making more noise than a whole drove of cattle lying peacefully chewing their cud beneath an umbrageous elm and lifting up their great, tranquil, blinking eyes to the morning sun.
A moment later she was painfully dragging herself up into the branches after which she slowly made her way back toward the foothills, glad to be rid of the surly Warruk and firmly resolved thereafter to pursue her own life in the treetops and to let the denizens of the lower world pursue theirs without interference from her.
And, ere he had time to turn himself, the desperate animal had rushed and trampled over him, and disappeared through a breach effected in one of the treetops that had hemmed him in and prevented his retreat from such a doubtful, hand-to-hand encounter.
Then rising, he exclaimed, with a determination which rendered him majestic, "If help is not forthcoming, I'll do it all myself. Nothing shall hold me back; nothing shall stop me; and when you see me and my car rise above the treetops, you'll feel that I have done what I could to make you forget " He did not need to continue.
The two men felt like a couple of shipwrecked sailors adrift on a shoreless, sunless ocean, alone save for the reddish flame flickering at the prow, and the submerged treetops that appeared and vanished rapidly. "Better begin to row, Cupido," said Rafael. "The current is very strong. We must be still in the river. Let's turn to the right and see if we can get into the orchards."
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