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He bound up the hurt with his handkerchief, and turned his face away from that tragic spot among the cottonwoods, their leaves moving with a murmur as of falling rain in the cool morning wind. "So I just took his gun away from him and slapped him and sent him on," said Joan. "I thought that must have been the way of it," Mackenzie said, sighing as if his last trouble had left him.
Before him, to left, to right, waving, rolling, sinking, rising, like low swells of a purple sea, stretched the sage. Out of the grove of cottonwoods, a green patch on the purple, gleamed the dull red of Jane Withersteen's old stone house.
He used to dream at night in the Desert of the day, perhaps, coming when they should set out together adventuring a life joy in the Forests; his Forests; when he would show her the golden cottonwoods and the pale birches nursing the pineries to strong maturity; and the fire blisters on the firs; and the sugar blisters on the sugar pines; and the rain of green-gray tempered light from the under side of the funereal hemlocks; and the park like glades of the wonderfully straight and serried soldier ranks of the engleman spruce and the lodge-pole pines; and the larches yellow as gold dust to the touch of the alchemist autumn.
The ploughed and planted country, that quilt of many-colored harvests which they had watched yesterday, lay in another world from this where they rode now. No hand but nature's had sown these crops of yellow flowers, these willow thickets and tall cottonwoods. Somewhere in a passage of red rocks the last sign of wagon wheels was lost, and after this the trail became a wild mountain trail.
"I'd better go right away," he continued, "and fetch supplies from Cottonwoods." A startlingly swift change in the nature of her agitation made him reproach himself for his abruptness. "No, no, don't go!" she said. "I didn't mean that about the rabbit. I I was only trying to be funny. Don't leave me all alone!" "Bess, I must go sometime." "Wait then. Wait till after the storms."
Even now all that Enoch could see was a wide lateral canyon with a rough unpainted shack above the waterline. A group of cottonwoods loomed dimly through the mist beside a fence that surrounded the house. Jonas, who had seemed overcome with joy at Agnew's announcement, recovered his power of speech by the time the boat was headed shoreward and he raised a shout that echoed from wall to wall.
What do you see now, young William?" "The forces on the flanks have passed out of sight among the cottonwoods, and the one in front is still advancing slowly. The warriors there seem to be armed chiefly with bows and arrows." "Meant mostly to draw our attention. The rifles are carried by the men on the flanks. B'ars out what we said 'bout thar plan.
The trained horses hidden in the cottonwoods never stirred. "Lie low! lie low!" breathed the plainsman to his companions. Throb of hoofs again became audible, not loud and madly pounding as those that had passed, but low, muffled, rhythmic. Jones's sharp eye, through a peephole in the thicket, saw a cream-colored mustang bob over the knoll, carrying an Indian.
The yellow flood of the river, still swollen by melting mountain snow, was a hundred feet from the stockade gate, and on its bank stood the log cavalry stables. Below, a scant half mile away, were the only trees visible, a scraggly grove of cottonwoods, while down the face of the bluff and across the flat ran the slender ribbon of trail.
A sharp clip-crop of iron-shod hoofs deadened and died away, and clouds of yellow dust drifted from under the cottonwoods out over the sage. Jane Withersteen gazed down the wide purple slope with dreamy and troubled eyes.
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