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Updated: May 21, 2025
There was no trail for his feet now. At times, he forced his way through and over bushes of buckthorn and manzanita that seemed, with their sharp thorns and tangled branches, to be stubbornly fighting him back. At times, he made his way along some steep slope, from pine to pine, where the ground was slippery with the brown needles, and where to lose his footing meant a fall of a thousand feet.
You KNOW I couldn't live in a street!" Austin laughed again. "Well, that settles Uncle William!" he announced comfortably. "I'll write him to-morrow, mother. Come on, now, we'll settle this other trouble!" And he and Manzanita disappeared in the direction of the stable. Mrs. Phelps sat thinking, deep red spots burning in her cheeks. Things could not go on this way. Yet she would not give up.
Having watched from the seat of his chariot the brief but ceremonial entry of Number Three, which, on regular schedule, roared through Manzanita at top speed, he descended, captured the mail-bag and, as the transcontinental pulled out, accosted the station-agent. "What'd she stop for, Ban?" "Special orders." "Didn't say nothin' about havin' a ravin' may-ni-ac aboard, did theh?" "No."
He rose to his knees among the stunted manzanita bushes not twenty steps from them and for a moment knelt there, his big bulky body wavering as he tried to bring his rifle to rest at his shoulder, his eyes peering out wildly from a blood smeared face.
And added to all this, Austin was different, noisier, bigger, younger than she remembered him: Manzanita was worse than her worst fears, and the rancho, bounded only by the far-distant mountain ridges, with its canyons, its river, its wooded valleys and trackless ranges, struck actual terror to her homesick soul. "Well, what do you think of her?
"I asked you if you didn't have a cat-fit when you realized that Aus was going to marry a girl you never saw?" Manzanita repeated with friendly enjoyment. Mrs. Phelps gave her only a few seconds' steady consideration for answer, and then pointedly addressed her son. "It sounds very strange to your mother, to have you called anything but Austin, my son," she said.
Banneker? No. Why should I?" "You published some of my things in the Sunday edition, lately. From Manzanita, California." "No. I don't think so. Mr. Homans." A graying man with the gait of a marionnette and the precise expression of a rocking-horse, who had just entered, crossed over. "Have we sent out any checks to a Mr. Banneker recently, in California?"
They continued on till the crunch of the rock-crusher died away, penetrated a belt of woodland, crossed a tiny divide where the afternoon sunshine was wine-colored by the manzanita and rose-colored by madronos, and dipped down through a young planting of eucalyptus to the Little Meadow. But before they reached it, they dismounted and tied their horses.
Just before Manzanita appeared in the kitchen doorway to ring a clamorous bell for some sixty ear-splitting seconds, her father, an immense old man on a restless claybank mare, rode into the yard, and the four brothers, Jose, Marty, Allen, and the little crippled youngest, eight-year-old Rafael, appeared mysteriously from the shadows, and announced that they were ready for dinner.
Arbutus shrubs of immense size were seen, and the landscape was in some places interspersed thickly with manzanita rushes, the crimson berries of which are much in favour with the Indians, also with the grizzly bear! Some of the plains they crossed were studded with magnificent oaks, devoid of underwood, such as one is accustomed to see in noblemen's parks in England.
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