United States or Fiji ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Bullet, his nostrils wide, his ears back, raced parallel in the boulder-strewn stream-bed, wonderful in his avoidance of bad footing, precious in his selection of good, interested in the game, indignant at the wayward Dinkey, profoundly contemptuous of the besotted mule. At a bend in the cañon interposed a steep bank. Up this we scrambled, dirt and stones flying.
Such a place afforded no room for an English village of the true manorial kind; and I surmise that it lay all but uninhabited until perhaps the middle of the eighteenth century, by which time a few "squatters" from neighbouring parishes had probably settled here, to make what living they might beside the stream-bed.
Equally, of course, after I had rammed around most happily for a while up the wooded stream-bed of that cañon, I turned sharp to the right and began to climb the slope of the spur, running out at right angles to the main ranges that constituted one wall of my cañon. It was fifteen hundred nearly perpendicular feet of hard scrambling through windfalls.
The following afternoon Pete, stiff and weary from his two days' ride, entered the southern end of Flores's cañon and followed the trail along the stream-bed now dry and edged with crusted alkali until he came within sight of the adobe.
Go and bring the trumpeter to me," he said, to one of the men. The light grows broader every moment. Already forms can be dimly distinguished up and down the stream-bed, and mounted Indians darting about out on the prairie. A sergeant comes up to the group of officers with quiet salute: "Those fellows up-stream are getting ready, captain.
Exceedingly level, they possessed characteristics of some of the best thoroughfares; but the wheel-ways were formed of round river stones which neither powdered nor set, and to drive along them was cruel to horses, ruinous to vehicles, and as trying on the nerves of travellers as crossing a stony stream-bed.
If he terraced the garden, he held up the earth with a couple of long narrow planks that soon began to bend with the pressure from behind, and would not need many years to rot through and break and let the soil slither all down again in a heap towards the stream-bed. But there you are. He had not been brought up to come to grips with anything, and he thought it would do.
For he saw a tall, strong barbed-wire fence stretching across the stream-bed, and beyond the fence were a litter of chicken-coops, iron bands from broken barrels, and a thousand other of those things which brand the typical western farm-yard; above the top of the bank to his left he caught a glimpse of the sharp roof of the house.
It was no longer bordered with creeping vines and patches of murmuring bee-bent heather. And the stream-bed also had lost nearly all its sentinel rushes, and the tall brakens from its shaggy slopes were gone. But Silver Beck still ran musically over tracts of tinkling stones; and, through the chilly air, the lustered black cock was crowing for the gray hen in the hollow.
Visitors to the region grew wonted to the sight of the comely figure in the slight birch canoe, shooting suddenly athwart their track, or found lying idly in some dark and shaded stream-bed.
Word Of The Day