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In others the drifts were deep. From a hillside they looked down into a grove of cottonwoods that filled a small draw. Here the snow had blown in and was heavy. Three elk were floundering in the white banks. Dud waded in and shot two with his revolver. The third was a doe. The cowponies snaked them out to the open. "We'll take 'em with us to 'Leven Mile camp," Dud said.
A few scattered cedars sprouted from the rocky ledges of the more broken country and a clump of gnarled, wind-twisted cottonwoods marked a distant water hole. A whitish glare was reflected from an alkali flat in the bottom of a shallow basin.
Those clumsy ironclads of his can't move backward or forward, and the Rebs have been peppering him for two days." Just then a fusillade broke from the thickets, nipping the branches from the cottonwoods about them. "Form your line," said the General. "Drive 'em out." The force swept forward, with the three picket companies in the swamp on the right.
Behind us our own main shore was wholly concealed by this mass of cottonwoods on the sands between it and the stream, on a spit of which we stood ambushed. On the water, a hundred and fifty yards or so from the jungle, pointed obliquely across the vast current, was a large skiff with six men in it. Four were rowing with all their power, a fifth sat in the bow and the other in the stern.
Silvermane walked into the glade with a saddle-girth so tight that his master unbuckled it only by dint of repeated effort. Evidently the rich grass of Thunder River Canyon appealed strongly to the desert stallion. "Here, Silver, how do you expect to carry us out if you eat and drink like that?" Hare removed the saddle and tethered the gray to one of the cottonwoods.
A fringe of azaleas, cottonwoods and quaking asps screened it completely from all that lay outside its charmed circle. A cheerful blue sky spread its canopy overhead. Here Bob and Elliott turned loose their horses and made their camp. After lunch they lay on their backs and smoked. Through a notch in the trees showed a very white mountain against a very blue sky. The sun warmed them gratefully.
This is to arrange a fight on virtuous grounds. The Lance says that in two days when the sun is overhead Black Cloud must come to the three cottonwoods near the mouth of the Cimmaron an' fight, or the Lance on the third day an' each day after will hunt for him as he'd hunt a wolf ontil Black Cloud is dead.
"The Mormons have risen against the rustlers. I understand now. John Caldwell spent last night in secretly rousing his neighbors. They have surprised the rustlers. Now what?" Hare vaulted the fence and ran down the road. A compact mob of men, a hundred or more, had halted in the village under the wide-spreading cottonwoods.
Down in the shallow valley to the right, where the cottonwoods are blistering beside the sandy stream-bed, a faint column of smoke rises straight as the stem of a pine-tree until it melts into indistinguishable air.
Some of the trees, especially the sycamores and the cottonwoods, were of giant size. And the woods abounded in nuts and wild fruits; hickory nuts, walnuts, pecans, pawpaws, big wild grapes, and persimmons, but the latter were not yet ripe.
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