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"Ladies and gentlemen," he was saying, as he smiled, "you favoured ones whose happy lot it is to live in the most glorious State of our glorious union, I greet you, and I envy you " Arline, with her soiled kitchen apron, her ragged coil of dust-brown hair, her work-drawn face and faded eyes which blazed with excitement, pushed unceremoniously through the crowd and confronted him undazzled.
There were tear-stained rings about the eyes, and his pink shirt and blue trousers were grimy with dust, and the red clay of the Sycamore still was on the sides of his dust-brown bare feet. Around a big toe was a rag which showed a woman's tying neat and firm, but red with clay. Ward left, and Bob Hendricks came and stood over the prostrate boy.
The entrance to the studio opened to the left of it, which entrance Vandover had hung with curtains of dust-brown plush. The casts of the Assyrian bas-reliefs were against the wall upon either side of the window. There were three of them, two representing scenes from the life of the king, the third the wounded lioness which Vandover never wearied of admiring.
It was the type of face which, in its broad modelling of planes and petal-fineness of edges, suggests a pansy. The blondness of her ashen-dead fairness of hair and pale skin with those pellucid eyes beneath dust-brown brows all united in an effort of innocence that surpassed itself and became the blandness of a doll.
For nearly half a mile to either side of their immediate rear, between the still unbroken surface of the dust-brown expanse and the edge of the trampled grassy plain, stretched a sort of canal, perhaps ten paces wide, of brown-black, glistening pitch, beaten up with thrashing antlers, and tossing heads that whistled despairingly through wide nostrils, and heaving, agonizing bulks that went down slowly to their doom.
Suppose you come along anyhow, a part of the way and have a quiet talk, all alone with us. Don't do anything until you have consulted Worth." "All right I'll go you," I assented, and half past two saw the three of us, Worth in corduroys and puttees, Barbara with high boots and short, dust-brown skirt, tramping out past the homes of people toward the open country.
A sandy plain, checkered across by verdant-banded arroyos, and splotched with little clumps of trees and little fields of corn. In the heart of it all was Santa Fé, a mere group of dust-brown adobe blocks silent, unsmiling, expressionless the city of the Spanish Mexican, centuries old and centuries primitive.
The frightened women, and still worse frightened children, no sooner saw the "dust-brown ranks" of the head of Morgan's column than they beat a hasty retreat down the alley to the house of Dr. Markle, the village physician.
Then he was struck by the fact that the dust-brown surface was seamed and criss-crossed in many places by small cracks like those in sun-scorched mud, except that the cracks were almost black in color. These things caused him no misgivings.
The last dust-brown battalion had passed away and the roadway was again clear. Yet the ceremony was incomplete. Before the staff could ride away the Mayor of Ladysmith advanced and requested Sir George White to receive an address which the townspeople had prepared and were anxious to present to him.
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