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Titus was now almost a mile from the nearest of his soldiers. He passed the Gate of the Women's Towers. Hedges, gardens, ditches and wind-breaks of cedars of Lebanon from time to time obscured him. When he came in sight again, he had placed obstruction between himself and retreat. The next instant the Gate of the Women's Towers swung in.
He had also wind-breaks of osier willow, which of course grows rapidly, and had been a source of profit to him in, yielding cuttings for sale. Timothy does not do well on tule land, as its roots do not push down deep enough, and the surface of such light soils always dries up rapidly. Mr.
Fresh tracks of horses and oxen, wagon-wheel ruts, dead camp-fires, and scattered brush that had been used for wind-breaks all these things attested to the growing impetus of that movement; soon it was to become extraordinary. All this was Indian country. Neale and his companion had no idea whether or not the Sioux had left their winter quarters for the war- path.
In digging his rows and shaping his patches he neglected the guiding string and trusted to his eye altogether too much, and the consequent obliquity and the various wind-breaks and scare-crows he erected, and particularly an irrigation contrivance he began and never finished by which everything was to be watered at once by means of pieces of gutter from the roof and outhouses of Number 2, and a large and particularly obstinate clump of elder-bushes in the abolished hedge that he had failed to destroy entirely either by axe or by fire, combined to give the gardens under intensive culture a singularly desolate and disorderly appearance.
As they returned in late afternoon the low sun was a solemnity of radial bands, like a heavenly fan of beaten gold; the limitless circle of the grain was a green sea rimmed with fog, and the willow wind-breaks were palmy isles. Before July the close heat blanketed them. The tortured earth cracked. Farmers panted through corn-fields behind cultivators and the sweating flanks of horses.
When the Tusayan Indian today moves to his kisi or summer brush house shelter he practically camps in his corn or near it, in easy reach to drive away crows, or build wind-breaks to shelter the tender sprouts; but to go to their cornfields the inhabitants of the cavate dwellings I have described were forced to cross a river before the farm was reached.
These gardens are planted yearly with melons and squashes, and stones forming the outlines serve as wind-breaks to protect the growing plants from drifting sand. The plotting of the plan of these gardens was made in 1891, when a somewhat larger part of the plaza was under cultivation than in 1895.
We came upon beautiful, spacious, open lawns of from eighty to one hundred acres apiece, separated from each other by narrow strips of tall forest trees. The grass was high, and waved in the breeze like planted grain; the boundary trees resembled artificial wind-breaks of eucalyptus or Normandy poplar.
Most of the farm-houses in the region remained equally unadorned, but Deacon Gammons had added an "ell" and established a "parlor," and Anson Burtch had painted his barn. The plain began to take on a comfortable look, for some of the trees of the wind-breaks had risen above the roofs, and growing maples softened the effect of the bleak expanse.
There was no natural shelter, literally nothing as big as your hat in the pasture, and several men advised the building of sheds, wind-breaks, etc. But experience told me just the opposite. Also I had seen whole bunches of cattle standing shivering behind open sheds and wind-breaks till they practically froze to death or became so emaciated as to eventually die of poverty.
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