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Updated: June 11, 2025
Then with a sudden resolve the whole party rode rapidly out of the hills and down toward the railroad. Bucks's heart misgave him as he watched. But the cotton-woods growing along the river hid the Indians from his eyes and he could not surmise what they were doing.
An Indian half-breed, porter of the Mansion House, was washing out the stains of recent nocturnal dissipation from the bar-room and veranda; a few birds were twittering on the cotton-woods beside the river; a bolder few had alighted upon the veranda, and were trying to reconcile the existence of so much lemon-peel and cigar-stumps with their ideas of a beneficent Creator.
Corrugated and snow-capped ridges slope backward from the spectator, on whichever side he turns, until he wonders how and where the swift river, rushing under its canopy of rustling cotton-woods, finds a pathway through them.
It was still in the valley. Had they come to the dead cotton-woods yet? Had they begun it? The children shrank from this gray-faced woman whom they did not know and but yet a little while had been their mother. An awful silence had fallen on the night. The range-cattle no longer bellowed in their thirst; the hot wind no longer blew from the desert.
"Do you understand, young fellow? If they start to cross the creek, leg it for the ranch or you'll lose your hair." Bucks strained his eyes looking for a sign of movement across the bridge. The cotton-woods swayed gently in the light breeze, but revealed nothing of what they hid. The freight train continued to crawl lazily along, its crews quite unconscious of any impending fate.
Out of the cotton-woods we had made our camp-fire, and this was some twenty or thirty paces back from the water, not in a conspicuous position, but in the bottom of a bowl-shaped depression in the prairie; a curious formation, for which none of us could account.
The first year after he came, Rankin had imported it, a goodly sized soft maple; and in the pathway of constantly trickling water, it had grown and prospered. It was the only tree for miles and miles about, except the scrawny scrub-oaks, cotton-woods, and wild plums that flanked the infrequent creeks, creeks which in Summer, save in deepest holes, reverted to mere dry runs.
The trees were all alike thereabout and easily mistaken one for another. Well?" "Thar was one of 'em different," pursued Rube, "a silver birch tree amongst the cotton-woods an' I found where you'd cut a stick from it an' smudged the cut so's it wouldn't easily be seen. Is that right? You carried that stick along of you brought it home.
They shook hands, and all went on together, the Boy saying the Colonel had a little sunstroke. The next day Scowl Austin was found lying face down among the cotton-woods above the benches on Skookum, a bullet-wound in his back.
He thought that it was hard to get it on right, for in front of him a line of blue still shone over which the lid had not yet been pressed down. The ground was pale with the whitened terror of upturned leaves, the high branches of the cotton-woods whipping back and forth in wild agitation.
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