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Updated: June 17, 2025
All at once the old mountaineer's eyes were aflame with eagerness as he came nearer to Aldous. "Get out of Tête Jaune to-night!" he cried in a low, hissing voice that quivered with excitement. "Hit the trail before dawn! Strike into the mountains with our outfit far enough back and then wait!" "Wait?" "Yes wait. If they follow us fight!" Slowly Aldous held out a hand. The old mountaineer's met it.
The girl was so pretty in her youth's clothing; her delicate ankles and white knees bare between the conventional thigh-length of green embossed leather breeches, rough green stockings, and fleece-lined hob-nailed shoes. And over the boy's shirt the mountaineer's frieze jacket! with staghorn buttons.
"Ef you take it so hard, I'll go back, an' I'll go willin'. Jus' say the word, Pop, an' I'll go!" The old mountaineer's one hand closed on the girl's bony arm in a tight clasp, his shoulders heaved, and his massive features worked, but his gaze never left the calm, pitying face of the Saviour overhead.
Later on, when the ridge was won he found himself, still in the company of the nightmare, cowering close to the lock of a rail fence that zigzagged along the crest. How he got there he really did not know. He had his musket still clutched his mountaineer's instinct served for that. Presently he made the discovery that he had been firing, had fired thrice, it appeared from his cartridge box.
Of course I had no weapon of any kind, but the Spaniards had allowed me to keep the silver key, which hung around my neck by a thin, stout cord. I had almost forgotten the mountaineer's strange words, when a trifling incident brought them vividly to my mind.
He went along with a mountaineer's long strides, striking the snow, which was as hard as a rock, with his iron-pointed stick, and with his piercing eyes he looked for the little black, moving speck in the distance, on that enormous, white expanse.
Examination showed that it was a painful and dangerous shoulder shot. He cleared away the stains, washed the hole, plucked the threads of cloth out of it, turned the man on his face and, with two quick slashes of a razor, cut out the missile which had done the injury. Healing liniment, the inevitable concoction of a mountaineer's cabin, soothed while it dressed the wound.
She had the California mountaineer's worship of water, and the gurgle of the stream among the sycamores filled her with vague rebellion. "Why couldn't he 'a' let us alone?" she mused resentfully. "As long as he had a share o' the spring it didn't show any signs o' dryin' up. Mother never said nothin' about Flutterwheel to him; it was all his doin's. But it's no use."
Thus she walked warily, and dared ask from none directions or help. She was not yet in her own region, these lower ridges lying between two lines of railway, which, from the mountaineer's point of view, contaminated them and gave them a tincture of the valley and the Settlement. Noon came and passed. She was very weary.
"Come in and partake of our morning meal; that will refresh you," said the mountaineer. "Thanks; yes, I will join you at once," he replied, but turned away thoughtfully. With the earliest morning, Aphiz was again at the cottage and by Komel's side. O, how beautiful did she look to him now, once more attired in her simple dress of a mountaineer's daughter.
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