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In a corner by himself sat a weather-beaten old shepherd, singing with closed eyes, his shaggy head waving to and fro in time with the strain. Up in this lonesome glen those words had been his stay and comfort during a life of hardship. Like David of old, he had sung them on the mountainside, and they had been as a guide unto his feet, a lamp unto his eyes.
Such was the scene that confronted Tabitha, as she rushed up to the door, terrified by her aunt's cry and the wild scratching of the imprisoned cat. As she flung open the screen there was a flash of black, a quavering meow and pussy, crazed by her terrible experience, streaked out of sight up the mountainside.
As the distant cry shrilled up the mountainside, the white bull stirred, shook his antlers, and blew loudly through his nostril. It was a note of challenge but in it the bear divined a growing hesitancy. Perhaps, after all, this fight, which had gone so sorely against him, might not have to be fought out!
Then, all at once, as the painter, with poised brush, glanced from his canvas to the scene, she stood in full view beside the spring; her graceful, brown-clad figure framed by the willow's green. Her arms were filled with wild flowers that she had gathered from the mountainside from nook and glade and glen.
When night was drawing nigh, I scanned the steep mountainside in search of an accessible bench, however narrow, where a bed and a fire might be gathered for a camp. About dark great was my delight to find a little shelf with a few small mountain hemlocks growing in cleavage joints.
"But as we stood talking great stones were thrown out of the volcano. They rolled down the mountainside close to us. If they had struck us it would have been death. There was only one way to save ourselves. I covered my face with my hat and rushed across the stream of lava. The melted rock was so thick and heavy that I did not sink in. I only burned my boots and scorched my hands.
The dazzling splendor of the noonday sun brings out vividly the variegated colors of the foliage, and banks of white fleecy clouds floating overhead trail their shadows over the valley and up the mountainside like ghostly outriders.
Across this Baldy led unswervingly, never hesitating, and hardly relaxing his steady pace, though the sudden gusts from the mountainside often curved the team into a half circle; and he was forced to keep his nose well into the air and brace himself firmly to keep from being carried off his feet. Further on came the Glacier Grade, on either side of which rose overhanging cliffs.
Then his shoulders twitched as though this was a matter which could not concern him at present and he had other things to think of. "Pollard?" he asked shortly. "Over yonder." Comstock nodded toward the patch of brush on the mountainside. "Shot through the head." "And the others? One was the Kid, wasn't it?..." But now the Kid answered for himself.
Thunder, hoarse with invective, and hurled mercilessly back and forth by the fitful wind, drew farther and farther into the recess of the mountains, only to launch its anger against its own imprisoned echoes. Under it all the two refugees, high on the mountainside, looked down on the flooding Gap. Their flight was almost ended. Only the sheer cliff ahead blocked their descent to the aspen grove.
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