Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 21, 2025
They had come up the road. They started back down the trail. Charlie had got nearly home when he began to worry about a deep prospect hole near the trail known as "Rosenhammer's Shaft." He must be careful to avoid it. Suddenly his foot slipped on a pebble. He clutched unavailingly at a manzanita and rolled into a circle of inky blackness. Rosenhammer's Shaft! Now he was lost, indeed. But, no.
He sent a wild-eyed glance to the still, purple lake down there where the snowbanks lingered, though it was the middle of May; to the far hills that were purpling already with the dropping of the sun behind the high peaks; to the manzanita slope where the trail lay in shadow now. It was terribly still and empty this piled wilderness.
Mail takes four days to reach Manzanita from New York. Through the hot months The House With Three Eyes had kept its hospitable orbs darkened of Saturday nights. Therefore, Banneker was free to spend his week-ends at The Retreat, and his Friday and Saturday mail were forwarded to the nearest country post-office, whither he sent for it, or picked it up on his way back to town.
I got off to lead my horse. He had to be pulled most of the time, wherefore I lost patience with him. I loved horses, but not stubborn ones. All the way down the rocky trail the bunch grass and wild oak and manzanita were so thick that I had to crush my way through. At length I had descended the steep part to find Edd and George waiting for me below on the juniper benches.
Then I plunged to a halt with eyes darting everywhere. R.C. was not in sight. The steep curved neck of slope seemed all rocks, all trees, all brush. Then I heard a wild hoarse bawl and a loud crashing of brush. My gaze swerved to an open spot. A patch of manzanita seemed to blur round a big bear, standing up, fighting the branches, threshing and growling.
South the land rises in very blue hills, blue because thickly wooded with ceanothus and manzanita, the haunt of deer and the border of the Shoshones. Eastward the land goes very far by broken ranges, narrow valleys of pure desertness, and huge mesas uplifted to the sky-line, east and east, and no man knows the end of it.
"Please, sir," she smiled up at him like a beseeching angel, "what did you do that kept us all talking and speculating about you for a whole week, though we didn't know your name?" "I sat right on my job as station-agent at Manzanita and made up lists of the killed and injured," answered Banneker dryly. "Station-agent!"
Beyond the gateway a lush level cañon into which you plunged as into a bath; then again the laboring trail, up and always up toward the blue California sky, out of the lilacs, and laurels, and redwood chaparral into the manzanita, the Spanish bayonet, the creamy yucca, and the fine angular shale of the upper regions. Beyond the apparent summit you found always other summits yet to be climbed.
To-day was a Sunday, so perfect that they had breakfast on the porch, and in the afternoon took a long climb on the mountainside, across patches of blossoming manzanita, and through meadows sweet with the liquid note of rising larks.
Many and many a place Jean would have chosen had he been in Queen's place. Many a rock and dense thicket Jean circled or approached with extreme care. Manzanita grew in patches that were impenetrable except for a small animal.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking