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Updated: June 22, 2025
The body swayed back and forth as he had once seen that of a "rustler" whom a group of cowboys had left hanging to the scraggly branch of a scrub-oak; as a pendulum marks time, measuring the velocity of the prairie wind. With each recurrence of the vision the perspiration broke out over the man anew, the sunburned forehead paled. This was what it was coming to; he could not escape it.
Relinquishing any return fire for a moment, the company, with a great shout, that sounded all along its front, dashed up the hill, through the scrub-oak at the brow, and then they could see the enemy slowly retiring, a chain of them a mile or more wide.
So Conniston filled his pipe, thought longingly of the cigarettes he had left in his suit-case at the hotel, and, lying down near Hapgood, smoked and dozed in the warm stillness. An hour passed. The shadow of the scrub-oak under which they had thrown themselves was a long blot across the sand. About them everything was drowsy and sleepy and still.
I'm kinder lonesome, too.... Toss me some cartridges first. I only got five. I left in a hurry. You got forty-fives?" "Plenty. But you can't stay there. They'll pot you from the top of the bluff, first off. Besides, you got a canteen, I see. You back up to that mountain mahogany bush, slip under it, and worm down through the rocks till you come to a little scrub-oak tree and a big granite bowlder.
Our route lay partly up hill and partly down, for we were in the sand-hill county; we drove past cultivated farms, and then by abandoned fields grown up in scrub-oak and short-leaved pine, and once or twice through the solemn aisles of the virgin forest, where the tall pines, well-nigh meeting over the narrow road, shut out the sun, and wrapped us in cloistral solitude.
It is to be hoped that Thoreau enjoyed his surveying, as he probably did, especially when it took him through sphagnum swamps or scrub-oak thickets or a tangle of briers and thorns. The more difficult the way, the more he could summon his philosophy. "You must get your living by loving." It is a hard saying, but it is a part of his gospel.
Big Flower was happily intact, and the nightcap also except for a missing string, but the outer layer of the other garments had paid toll to many an affectionate scrub-oak and manzanita, and the stockings that had stood the brunt were practically footless. Pio surveyed the damage ruefully, and rebuked himself for not having preserved his new property by wearing his own clothes outside.
"I know where there's lots of it," said he, as if to himself, "out in the hills. It loves to ramble over scrub-oak in the open places where there's plenty of sun. I used to pick armloads of it the last year I went to school and carry it to the teacher. She liked to decorate the room with it."
"That is so, sir; excuse me, my feelings overcame me," he said, and retiring a few steps, he leaned upon a branch of a scrub-oak and sobbed like a child. The farce and the tragedy of real life were here exhibited on another occasion. Among my acquaintances in the city were a man and his wife who were singularly mismatched.
Thence, through a tangled wilderness of scrub-oak and manzanita, down a steep slope, into a pretty cañon. "Here we are." A sudden turn of the trail revealed a squatter's hut built of rough lumber, and standing beneath a live-oak. A small creek was babbling its way to the Salinas River. The clearing in front of the hut was strewn with empty tins.
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