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I had ridden out by myself on my pony, and had reached a somewhat secluded part of the park, where the bridle-path passed among grassy knolls, and tall trees, flinging their branches across a narrow dell, formed a thick canopy overhead, and gave a somewhat gloomy aspect to the sequestered spot.
I do not mean that he treated this public property as other, and more conventionally-minded, men habitually treat it. Mr. Shaw walks down the Strand as if it were his private bridle-path. He walks across an Insurance Bill or a National Theatre scheme or a policy for giving self-government to Englishmen as a man who might be treading the weeds in his own garden.
We staid at Gomez's that night, sleeping, as all did, on the ground, and the next morning we crossed the hill by the bridle-path to the old Mission of San Juan Bautista. The Mission was in a beautiful valley, very level, and bounded on all sides by hills. The plain was covered with wild-grasses and mustard, and had abundant water.
From the mountain's peak its broken turrets rise above the groves of ancient oaks and olives, and look wonderfully picturesque. It is of such high antiquity that no man knows who built it or when it was built. It is utterly inaccessible, except in one place, where a bridle-path winds upward among the solid rocks to the old portcullis.
Under him lay Jellico Valley, and just visible in a wooded cove, whence Indian Creek crept into sight, was a mining-camp-a cluster of white cabins-from which he had climbed that afternoon. At that distance the wagon-road narrowed to a bridle-path, and the figure moving slowly along it and entering the forest at the base of the mountain was shrunk to a toy.
He preferred to take that pleasant bridle-path through Maudesley Park, that delicious grassy arcade where the overarching branches of the old elms made a shadowy twilight, only broken now and then by sudden patches of yellow sunshine; where the feathery ferns trembled with every low whisper of the autumn breeze: where there was a faint perfume of pine wood; where every here and there, between the lower branches of the trees, there was a blue glimmer of still water-pools, half-hidden under flat green leaves of wild aquatic plants, where there was a solemn stillness that reminded one of the holy quiet of a church, and where Sir Philip Jocelyn had every chance of meeting with Laura Dunbar.
"No," said Sutch, regretfully. "There would be no disloyalty." And on that evening Durrance took the train for Holyhead. The farm-house stood a mile above the village, in a wild moorland country. The heather encroached upon its garden, and the bridle-path ended at its door.
"Squadron talk; and you're full of it," retorted Fleetwood "'I said to the major, and 'The captain told the chief trumpeter' all that sort of thing and those Porto Rico spurs of yours, and the ewe-necked glyptosaurus you block the bridle-path with every morning. You're an awful nuisance, Tom, if anybody should ask me."
Watson shouted back over the shaved tail of his substitute for a horse. "I'll bring him back, dead or alive, or my name ain't Watson!" And over the way the stage had stopped, and Fanny Borlan had reached Ten Mile Gulch at last. A little after sunrise, the next morning, Mr. Tom Ruger might have been seen leisurely riding along the bridle-path between the mines and the settlement of Ten Mile Gulch.
But others had seen it as well; there was some shouting, half a dozen flung down their kegs and started in pursuit. All eyes were turned to the bridle-path, and in a twinkling hunters and hunted were in view.
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