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Occasionally a loon called to us, or an owl swooped, ghost-like, overhead, and as we passed among pine-crested isles, those weather-beaten old monarchs just stood there, and whispering to one another, shook their heads as we swept by. Then for a few moments a mother moose with her two calves stood knee deep in a water-lily bay, and watched us on our way.
Riding at ease in the lazy afternoon sunshine a single troop of cavalry was threading its way in long column of twos through the bold and beautiful foothills of the Big Horn. Behind them, glinting in the slanting rays, Cloud Peak, snow clad still although it was late in May, towered above the pine-crested summits of the range.
The gods walked on and on, getting more tired and hungry at every step. The sun was sinking low over the steep, pine-crested mountains, and the travelers had neither breakfasted nor dined. Even Odin was beginning to feel the pangs of hunger, like the most ordinary mortal, when suddenly, entering a little valley, the famished gods came upon a herd of cattle.
Noting after ten o'clock that morning that the battalion was no longer marching due south, but had turned, heading southwest straight away for the landmark of the valley, that distant, black, pine-crested peak, the lurking warriors had devised their scheme to lure a scouting detachment away from the support of the column.
The next morning, just as the sun came laboriously over the white peak of a mountain, and looked down into the great gulch beneath the hut, the three started. For many hours they crept along the side of the mountain, then came slowly down upon pine-crested hills, and over to where a small plain stretched out. It was Pourcette's little farm.
And with the following day he was bounding and bumping down the stony road that led from the breezy, pine-crested heights about headquarters to the sandy flats and desert rocks and ravines fifty miles to the east and twenty-five hundred feet below. "Shall be with you after dark," he wired Cutler, who was having a bad quarter of an hour on his own account, and wishing all Sandy to the devil.
Then the piling snows stopped the skating with a white Christmas, the old year sank to rest, the new rose up, and Bylow Hill, under its bare elms and with the pine-crested ridge at its back, sat in the cold sunshine like a white sea bird with its head in its down.
Then the evening star silvered their wake through the deep Rigolets, and the rising moon met them, her and her lover, in Lake Borgne, passing the dark pines of Round Island, and hurrying on toward the white sand-keys of the Gulf. The night was well advanced as they neared the pine-crested dunes of Cat Island, in whose lee a more cautious sailor would have dropped anchor till the morning.
"And this note explains it?" "Yes. You can read it to-morrow." And the morrow has come. Down in a deep and bluff-shadowed valley, hung all around with picturesque crags and pine-crested heights, under a cloudless September sun whose warmth is tempered by the mountain-breeze, a thousand rough-looking, bronzed and bearded and powder-blackened men are resting after battle.
Eager as lovers and husbands to get their mail, every man had dropped the letter he happened to be reading when young Hunter, searching a later Cheyenne paper, set up a whoop that made the pine-crested heights echo again and again. Then waving his paper and dancing like a madman, the youngster yelled at the top of his voice, "Ray's innocent! Ray's acquitted! 'Twas a deserter, Wolf, who did it!
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