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Four miles, or a little more, and I should be in familiar land again. Four miles, that I longed to make, before the last light failed... The road angled to the northeast. I was by no means very sure of it. I knew which general direction to hold, but trails that often became mere cattle-paths crossed and criss-crossed repeatedly. It was too dark by this time to see very far.
At fifteen I became a resident in a country village more than a hundred miles from home. The morning after my arrival a September morning, but warm and bright as any in July I rambled into a wood of oaks with a few walnut trees intermixed, forming the closest shade above my head. The ground was rocky, uneven, overgrown with bushes and clumps of young saplings and traversed only by cattle-paths.
At daybreak they returned, sad and dispirited, to their homes, to snatch a morsel of food, endeavour to cheer the drooping hearts of the weeping mothers, and hurry off, taking different directions. But, unfortunately, they had little clue to the route which Hector and Louis had taken, there being many cattle-paths through the woods.
Where the firm ground of the pasture ceases, the meadow begins, loose, spongy, yielding to the tread, sometimes permitting the foot to sink into black mud, or perhaps over ankles in water. Cattle-paths, somewhat firmer than the general surface, traverse the dense shrubbery which has overgrown the meadow.
It was where the hard-beaten, converging cattle-paths hurled themselves over the brink to the wide depths below. The stillness that prevailed was unbroken by a single night sound. Even the insect life seemed wrapped in a deep hush of somnolence. As yet the night scavengers had not emerged from their hidings to bay the silvery radiance of a moonlit night.
I am so often on the moor. I think you would find more kinds outside than you fancy. But what do you know? That beside some short fine grass about the cattle-paths, there are hardly any grasses on the moor save deer's hair and glade-grass; and all the rest is heath, and moss, and furze, and fern. But we will look into that another time.
But there were several cattle-paths through the thicket, by which it might be traversed; and these were known to Antonio the half-blood, who had formerly lived in this neighbourhood. By one of those a party of mounted men might approach within half-a-mile of the Presidio without attracting the observation of the sentries upon the walls.
To the south I could see the dun-shaded river bluffs that used to look so big to me, and all about stretched drying cornfields, of the pale-gold colour, I remembered so well. Russian thistles were blowing across the uplands and piling against the wire fences like barricades. Along the cattle-paths the plumes of goldenrod were already fading into sun-warmed velvet, grey with gold threads in it.
The ground was rocky, uneven, overgrown with bushes and clumps of young saplings, and traversed only by cattle-paths. The track, which I chanced to follow, led me to a crystal spring, with a border of grass, as freshly green as on May morning, and overshadowed by the limb of a great oak. One solitary sunbeam found its way down, and played like a goldfish in the water.
Behind him lay a little mountain lake, from which flowed the brook which made this mountain pass; on either side of this lake ran cattle-paths, leading to the saeters, which could be seen in the distance.
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