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There was something so gentle, refined, and graceful in her figure, yet dominated by a girlish youthfulness of movement and gesture, that Alkali Dick was singularly interested. He had probably never seen an ingenue before; he had certainly never come in contact with a girl of that caste and seclusion in his brief Parisian experience.
Taking a short cut I ran back to the foot of the pass and there, on hands and knees, ascended for a hundred feet or more—the bear steps led up the pass, and yet at the beginning of the trail the feet wore moccasins. This I knew because at one place the foot-mark showed plainly in the gray alkali dust which had accumulated upon a projecting stone a few feet below the ledge.
Early the next morning they passed the last line-house and, with the profane well-wishes of its occupants ringing in their ears, passed onto one of Nature's worst blunders the Staked Plain. As the sun arose it revealed three punchers riding away from civilization. On all sides, stretching to the evil-appearing horizon, lay vast blotches of dirty-white and faded yellow alkali and sand.
At last, when Peggy's head was beginning to sway with exhaustion, the eastern sky began to grow gray. The coming day lit up the desert wanly, as if it had been a leaden sea. But with the uprising of the sun the familiar glaring white of the alkali blazed out once more. They had left the pinnacled hills and were now traveling over undulating country overgrown with rough brush.
The traceries of streams or shining white washes brightened the floor of the long dark pit. Patches and plains of white, borax flats or alkali, showed up like snow. A red haze, sinister and sombre, hung over the eastern ramparts of this valley, and over the western drooped gray veils of rain, like thinnest lacy clouds, through which gleams of the sun shone.
To the end, to the death if need were, he would follow! The memory of his old plains craft would not permit any neglect of the few necessaries for the trip. He bought without haggling over prices, but insisted on the best. So it was four in the afternoon when he finally struck into the trail leading northward. This proved at first a broad, plainly marked path, across the alkali plain.
Against the flat, baking, quivering expanse of alkali the crawling splotch of black showed up as plainly as a blot of ink on a sheet of clean white blotting paper. Peering over the edge of the chassis they all scrutinized it closely. "It's it's a man!" cried Jess at length. "So it is!" declared Peggy, "and on foot. What can he be doing out in this desert country without a horse?"
When evaporated they have an inappreciable residue which consists of a little silica and a trace of alkali; their temperature is only 44.5 degrees, and the bubbles of air which are disengaged at intervals are at Onoto, as well as in the thermal waters of Mariara, pure nitrogen. The quantities are so small that the water is altogether without taste.
The depreciation is caused chiefly by kelp, and other substitutes found in the British alkali, a French chemical discovery, manufactured from sea salt, from which, the other ingredients are detached, by combination with sulphur, and acids subjected to heat. The imports of barilla from the Canary Islands to this country are about 3,500 tons a-year.
Lister went to the opera with his hosts and was moved by the music and the feeling that he was one of a careless, pleasure-seeking crowd. For the most part, his life had been strenuous and the crowds he knew were rude. His home was a bare shack, sometimes built on the wind-swept alkali plains, and sometimes in the tangled woods.
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