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But at noon, while the little party was taking a luncheon in the shade of a solitary birch that grew by the side of a little creek, or runlet, Sandy, the irrepressible, with his bread and meat in his hand, darted off to the next roll of the prairie, a high and swelling hill, in fact, "to see what he could see."
Baldassarre, looking up blankly from the search in the runlet that brought him nothing, had seen a white object coming along the broader stream. Could that be any fortunate chance for him? He looked and looked till the object gathered form: then he leaned forward with a start as he sat among the rank green stems, and his eyes seemed to be filled with a new light. Yet he only watched motionless.
Out of one of the furrowing ravines, a sunbaked and wrinkled trough springing from the turnpike below and running up and across the Henry Hill toward the crest of pine and oak, came now a handful of men, grey shadows, reeling, seeking the forest and night. Another followed another then a stream, a grey runlet of defeat which grew in proportions.
The Indian encampment lay in a hollow, the small wattled huts gathered on both sides of a runlet that oozed from the slope and slipped between a line of stepping stones. The hollow was deep for the level country, the grassed sides sweeping abruptly to the higher reaches above. They walked through it, examining the neatly made huts and speculating on the length of time the Indians had left.
As to wine, he already had a tolerable stock; but he increased it by half a hogshead of the best canary he could procure; two casks of malmsey, each containing twelve gallons; a quarter-cask of Malaga sack; a runlet of muscadine; two small runlets of aqua vitae; twenty gallons of aniseed water; and two eight-gallon runlets of brandy.
"Don't don't, Violet! It seems like killing is all I hear the sound of those guns I hear them all the time, I can't get them out of my ears!" "Suppose," said Violet, looking off across the runlet sparkling, gurgling like an infant across the bar, "it was him you saw when you looked in there, instead of the others. You'd have been satisfied then, I suppose?"
And there, farther on, just under the bank, by the slender runlet, which still trickles between its transparent fantastic margin of thin ice, as if it were a thing of life, there, with a swift, scudding motion, flits, in short low flights, the gorgeous kingfisher, its magnificent plumage of scarlet and blue flashing in the sun, like the glories of some tropical bird.
The pinons afforded their farinaceous cones, the agave yielded its esculent roots, and the prairie-turnip grew upon the borders of the runlet. They saw a small plant with white lily-like flowers. Lucien recognised all these edible productions; and promised his brothers a luxurious dinner on the morrow. For that night, all three were too much fatigued and sleepy to be nice about their appetites.
During the week that followed the arrival of the troops we received intelligence of several attacks upon isolated farms, and even small villages, in the outlying and more sparsely populated districts; from which it speedily became apparent that the regular troops, consisting, as they did, entirely of infantry, and hampered, as they were, by their baggage wagons, were altogether too slow-moving to be effective in overtaking and bringing to action the nimble bodies of savages, who were encumbered with no impedimenta of any description whatsoever excepting their weapons a shield, knobkerrie, and sheaf of assagais; who slept under the stars, quenched their thirst at every stream or runlet that crossed their path, and eat whatever came to hand, whether it chanced to be buck, bullock, or green mealies.
Bradford also mentions the filling of a "runlet" with water at the Cape.
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