United States or North Korea ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
In consequence, the pioneering fell chiefly on Van Horn; even Stone showed little stomach for the job. But the trail was completely lost. "There's a bunch of horses grazing at the fork," reported Van Horn, as Doubleday reached the front, "Laramie's, I guess anyway, the trail's gone." A council was held. Doubleday, long-headed and crafty, listened to all that was said.
If horses think, Laramie's horse must have imagined himself backed by a madman, and under the goading of his rider, the beast, quivering with fear, peered at the broken rocks below and sprang down among them. Concealment was no longer possible.
Before reaching Laramie's Fork, he met on the 28th of June a party of fourteen trappers, in the employ of the American Fur Company, making their way on foot with their blankets and light camp equipage on their backs. Two months previously they had started from the mouth of the Laramie River in boats loaded with furs destined for the St. Louis market.
While he was searching for a lamp, her eyes ran quickly over the dark interior, lighted fitfully as the driftwood, snapping on the stone hearth, flared at times into a blaze. Kate herself, despite the doubts and fears of her situation, was conscious of a strange feeling in being under Laramie's roof at one with him in so far as he could make her feel so.
Where the danger was, or what, she did not know, but she could obey orders. Her eyes tried to follow Laramie's, bent ahead. The bottoms spread level in every direction. The approach to the little bridge and beyond was as open as the day.
Crack, crack, went the pistols, while bullets rattled around the feet of the men on the hatch, and Laramie's whistle rose and fell on the soft morning air. The sun, who has looked on many scandalous sights, looked on this, and hid his face under a cloud, refusing to witness. For never before had the ethics of shipboard life been so outrageously violated.
All these noises, big and little, were familiar to Laramie's ears. He could hear them in his sleep without losing the thread of a dream; but the echo of a single footstep would bring him up sitting. The sound that now caught his attention had a still different effect.
Enraged, and realizing too late how every possibility in the fight had been figured out by his enemy before he stepped into sight, Stone, crippled, yet forced to circle, dropped once more on his knee to smash in a final shot. He was covered the instant he knelt. A bullet from Laramie's rifle shook him like a leaf. His head, jerking, sunk to his breast. With a superhuman effort he rallied.
With a sense of her wrongs keen upon her, Belle, forgetting her charge in the kitchen, hurried after him. Even then, Kate hoped that by keeping deathly still she might escape an unpleasant meeting. She never breathed more carefully in her life, yet she was doomed. She heard Laramie's chair pushed back and heard his footsteps.
It had been deliberate murder, for upon the bar had been left a piece of paper rudely scrawled with a pencil: "All friends of rangers look for the same." This roused Duane. His first move, however, was to bury Laramie. None of Laramie's neighbors evinced any interest in the dead man or the unfortunate family he had left. Duane saw that these neighbors were held in check by fear. Mrs.
Word Of The Day