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Updated: May 19, 2025
Emsden thought ruefully of the girl's mother and wondered if her intercession would avail aught with the old autocrat. But he had not yet ventured upon this. There was nothing certain about Mrs. Mivane but her uncertainty. She never gave a positive opinion. Her attitude of mind was only to be divined by inference. She never gave a categorical answer.
And the Injuns all so unfriendly they might take the chance to get on the war-path again when the settlers are busy killing each other and oh, the cow-drivers will kill Ralph Emsden!"
"And who do you suppose will promise to carry such a message to those desperate, misguided men, riding hither an' thither, searching this wild and woeful wilderness for hundreds o' head o' cattle lost like needles in a hayrick, and eat by wolves an' painters by this time?" demanded "X" derisively. "I promise, I promise! and with hearty good will, too!" declared Emsden.
Emsden threw himself into a posture of defense as instantly as if he had been a trained bullfighter and the arena his wonted sphere, holding the knife close in front of him, presenting the blade with a quick keen calculation for the animal's jugular.
She had not heard of the disaster that had befallen Ralph Emsden, and she turned rather pale and wistful when the news was communicated to her.
"If I hadn't been so traveled that day, dragged through hell and skirting of purgatory and knocking at the gates of heaven, I wouldn't have lost my wits so suddenly when I came back to earth with a bounce," Emsden afterward declared.
The elder Mivane, with his head bent forward, his hand behind his ear, sat in his arm-chair while he hearkened blandly to the sentimental statements which Emsden was obliged to shout forth twice. Then Richard Mivane cleared his throat with a sort of preliminary gentlemanly embarrassment, and went fluently on with that suave low voice so common to the very deaf. "Command me, sir, command me!
On this was stretched the insensible form of Ralph Emsden, who had been stricken down in the woods with a dislocated shoulder and a broken arm by the falling of a branch of a great tree uprooted by the violence of the gusts.
For as the hunters were coming at a brisk trot in single file along the "old trading path," as it was called even then, the fleecy white clouds racing above in the dense blue of the sky, their violet shadows fleeting as swift along the slopes of the velvet-soft azure mountains, and the wind far outstripping them in the vernal budding woods, a sudden stir near at hand caused Emsden to turn his head.
Since the Cherokee War, and the obliteration of all previous marks of white settlements in this remote region, Emsden was unfamiliar with the more recent location of "cow-pens," as the ranches were called, and was only approximately acquainted with the new site of the settlers' stations. Nothing so alters the face of a country as the moral and physical convulsion of war.
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