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While the three sat on the wide, unroofed porch, loitering over their coffee, a great, yellow-red moon rose slowly over the hill, and floated silently above them. Presently its light flooded the landscape, and strange and romantic vistas appeared between the redwoods aisles, and the tops of the forest trees far below them showed in a brilliant gray light, soft and furry.
The sun was going down on the Carquinez Woods. The few shafts of sunlight that had pierced their pillared gloom were lost in unfathomable depths, or splintered their ineffectual lances on the enormous trunks of the redwoods. For a time the dull red of their vast columns, and the dull red of their cast-off bark which matted the echoless aisles, still seemed to hold a faint glow of the dying day.
Nothing that Red Creek could offer shook her yearning for the remembered sweetness and beauty of the redwoods, and the great shade of the mountain. She wanted to spend a whole summer with Alix. She was athirst for home, for old scenes and old friends and old emotions. She had only to hint to Alix to receive a love letter containing a fervent invitation. So it was settled.
Only, warn him that it isn't to change your mind about about saying yes. It would be awful to rush up here happy and hopeful, only to find out what he'll have to find out." "You don't understand," said Angela. "I care too much to dare see him again. I couldn't trust myself. "Ah, but you could trust him. He's strong and high in his nature like the great redwoods."
But ever his gaze returned to the wonderful lily beside the bubbling spring. He tethered the horse and wandered on foot among the knolls. Their tops were crowned with century-old spruce trees, and their sides clothed with oaks and madronos and native holly. But to the perfect redwoods belonged the small but deep canon that threaded its way among the knolls.
On its three lower tables the mountain is green and bare; then abruptly rises a forest of redwoods, tall, rigid, tenebrious. The mountain is visible but a moment. An immense white fog-bank which has been crouching on the horizon rears suddenly and rushes across the ocean, whose low mutter rises to a roar. It sweeps like a tidal wave across cliffs and Fort.
But even in the gloom Alix could tell that fog was lifting, and a sudden sweep of breeze, like a tired breath, went over the tops of the redwoods. Steadily came the change. The darkness, by imperceptible degrees, lifted. The world grew gray as if with moonshine, trees and bushes began to stand out dimly from the mass of shadows.
We rode for days from station to station, through a delightful country, under the feathery, scented redwoods and beside clear mountain-streams in which the trout leaped. We slept in barns on the hay or on the far-from-downy rawhide cots in the ranch shanties, and subsisted on freshly killed beef hastily barbecued over the campfire, coming back to Monterey sunburned to a fine mahogany.
They were running about on the hills, or standing still to look at the ship until the noise frightened them off. At that time the whole country was covered with thick trees and bushes where the wolf and coyote prowled, and the grizzly bear's track was seen everywhere. There are plenty of deer in the redwoods now, and in the high Sierras are black-tailed and large mule-deer.
In the gulch he had a sacred spot, where, under the majestic redwoods, he retired to write, and in a small building he had a small printing-press, from which the world was to have been led to the light. But there was some failure of connection, and stern necessity compelled the surrender of these high hopes.
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