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Frank shed tears of gratitude upon the General's coat sleeve and threw kiss after kiss to the handsome sailor as she hung over the balusters of the broad veranda and waved them away in their swift-running cabs, and then danced off to her room and threw herself on the bed after a mad pirouette about the spacious apartment, and laughed and laughed until real tears trickled from her eyes, and then gave orders to be called at seven o'clock.

Gypsies will not work unless driven to do so by absolute want, but necessity sometimes compels them; and so occasionally they may be found manipulating the waters of the swift-running Darro for gold, which is often found in paying quantities.

Struggling, slipping, tumbling, jumping, ledge after ledge was surmounted, but still, upheaved against the glittering sky, rose new difficulties to be overcome. Immense bubbles have risen from the confused masses, and bursting, have yawned apart. Swift-running streams of more recent lava have cleft straight furrows through the older congealed surface.

The roads were gullies of swift-running water and icy sloughs; the cold was severe; and the cutting wind at times drove the sleet and rain in slanting scourges, before which scarce man or beast could stand. The funeral was held in the village church, which was larger than the college chapel.

Paisano, well named after that ungainly but swift-running bird, struck into his long lope that ate up the ground like a strip of macaroni. In two hours and a quarter Raidler, from a gentle swell, saw the branding camp by a water hole in the Guadalupe. Sick with expectancy of the news he feared, he rode up, dismounted, and dropped Paisano's reins.

To any one unaccustomed to the sea the change thus wrought in the course of a few short minutes would have seemed marvellous, almost miraculous, indeed; for whereas while we were hove-to, head to wind and sea, the plunging of the ship had been so furious that it was only with the utmost difficulty even the most seasoned among us could maintain our footing; while the howling and shrieking of the wind aloft, and the savage force with which it struck us when the frigate rolled to windward, irresistibly suggested the idea that we were in the grip of a hurricane; now, when we were scudding away almost dead before it, the gale seemed to have suddenly softened to the strength of no more than a moderate breeze; there were no repetitions of those sickening lee lurches as the ship was flung aloft on the steep breast of a mountainous, swift-running sea, but, in place of it, a gentle, rhythmical, pendulum-like swinging roll, and a long, easy, gliding rush forward, with an acre of foam seething and hissing about our bows as those same steep, mountainous seas caught us under the quarter and hurled us headlong forward with our bow-wave roaring and boiling ahead of us, glass-smooth, and clear as crystal.

Our hands and our feet are torn by the sharp rocks, and our trail is marked by our blood. At last I see a rift in the rocks. A little way beyond there are green prairies. The swift-running water, the Niobrara, pours down between the green hills. There are the graves of my fathers. There again we will pitch our teepee and build our fires. I see the light of the world and of liberty just ahead.

And at such moments, when the mind is driven into a swift-running channel that ends in a cataract, elemental passions are apt to strive with elemental fears. Few among these rough sailors had ever given thought to the future. They had lived from hand to mouth, the demands of a hard and dangerous profession alternating with bouts of foolish revelry.

Team after team of little yellow and gray Eskimo dogs, as quick with their fangs as were their black and swift-running masters with their hands and feet, met the much larger and dark-colored Malemutes from the Athabasca. Enemies of all these packs of fierce huskies trailed in from all sides, fighting, snapping and snarling, with the lust of killing deep born in them from their wolf progenitors.

About a quarter of four one afternoon, three young men were standing together on a road leading down to a swift-running river. It was an old road, beaten down hard by thousands of feet through hundreds of years. It led down to the river, and then along its bank through a village scatteringly nestled by the fords of the river. The young men were intently absorbed in conversation.