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Here there was a bloody conflict; men fell by the score; the snow was reddened by the blood of both patriots and traitors. The smoke seemed to hover around the trees and underbrush, as if to conceal the contending forces from each other. The flame of musketry and the red glare of the cannons lighted up the scene with a lurid tint.
With his square jaw set in a decisive manner, the man picked up his gun, threw back his heavy shoulders, and began to climb, driving his muscular body forcibly through the underbrush. The decision and the action were both characteristic of Donald MacDonald, in whose Yankee veins ran the blood of a dour and purposeful Scottish clan.
Roland shook the massive door. It was only latched, and opened at the first pressure. Outside the sill the tracks of blood still continued. Roland could see through the underbrush the path by which the body had been carried. The broken branches, the trampled grass, led Roland to the edge of the wood on the road leading from Pont d'Ain to Bourg.
They hurried through the underbrush towards the river, where a few cedar clumps overhung its edge. Duncan seized one and, leaning over, looked down into the dark ravine. The pale moonlight touched the water and revealed the cause of the unusual sounds. Strange dark forms were hurrying along its glinting surface. Down the foaming tide they came, shooting past, swift and stealthy.
There were three men with heavy-duty blast-rifles. One was the one Calhoun had burned out of his hiding place. That man's rifle exploded when the flames hit it. Two remained. One, so Calhoun presently discovered was working his way behind underbrush to a shelf from which he could shoot down at Calhoun. Calhoun had dropped into a hollow and pulled Maril to cover at the first shot.
And only the little band itself would ever know how stony that path, how deep the ditches, how thick and thorny the underbrush. "Why this couldn't have been so bad," the crowd said, after it had flocked in "strange it should have taken so long!" Not that the little band sought popular acclaim, or desired it.
Nearly half a mile separated Roosevelt’s men from the regulars, and between, and on both sides of the road in the thick underbrush, was concealed a force of Spaniards that must have been large, judging from the terrific and constant fire they poured in on the Americans. The fight was opened by the First and Tenth Cavalry, under General Young.
One turned often to the other, held back a branch, or proffered such service as he might over rough places, for Betty Dalrymple's movements were no longer those of a lithe wood-nymph; she had never felt so weary before. The first shades of twilight made it harder to distinguish their way amid intervening objects, and once an elastic bit of underbrush struck her sharply in the face.
And from under the rim of this thatch, and half hidden in the matted masses of badly adjusted hair, was a thin, peaked nose, bridged by a pair of big spectacles, and somewhere below these, again, a pitfall of a mouth covered with twigs of hair and an underbrush of beard, while deep-set in the whole tangle, like still pools reflecting the blue and white of the sweet heavens above, lay his eyes, eyes that won you, kindly, twinkling, merry, trustful, and trusting eyes.
Akoko looked for spruce trees that had been blown down by the storm, but found none, so she stopped under some standing spruce, at a place with no underbrush and said: "See, Nagami, here we dig for wattap." The spruce roots or "wattap" were near the surface and easily found, but not easily got out, because they were long, tangled and criss-crossed.
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