t-a white serpent with a bristling head of scattered horsemen, then a white worm, its head a collection of dark particles, then a white thread wi

hty bluffs, and bearing northwestward to Fort Laramie. The easy faring of the grassed bottom was over. The turn to the North Fork was the turn to the mountains. The slow stream with its fleet of islands would lose its dreamy deliberateness and be

creeping streams. Long files flowed from the rifts between the dwarfed bluffs, unbroken herds swept in a wave over the low barrier, advanced to the river, crusted its surface, passed across, and surged up the opposite bank. Finally all sides showed the moving mass, blackening the plateau, lining the water's edge in an endless undulation of backs and heads, foaming dow

t. Through the thin, glass-like spread of water the backs of sand bars emerged, smooth as the bodies of recumbent monsters.

Half way across, grown unduly confident, the doctor turned in his saddle to address his daughter when his horse walked into a quicksand and unseated him. It took them half an hour to drag it out, Susan imploring that her

s and, between her puffs, scolding at her father, first, for having got wet, then for having stayed wet, and now for being still wet, was to David just as charming as any of the other and milder apoth

ingly on the sky. She looked as if she might be dreaming a maiden's dream of love. He hazarded a tentative remark. Her eyes moved, touched him indifferently, and passed back to the sky, and an unformed murmur, interrogation, acquiescence, casual response, anything he pleased to think it, escaped her

sy voice, "I'm going to sle

th, he crept nearer and drew a blanket over her, careful not to touch her. He looked at the unconscious face for a moment,

nd looked at her, his sensitive face softening like a woman's watching the sleep of her child. Susan, all unconscious, with her rich young body showing in faint curves under the defining blanket, and her hair lying loose among the roots of the lupine bush, was so devoid of that imperious quality that m

, with depths unknown to his groping intelligence, made a rush of supplication, a prayer to be worthy, rise in his heart. He looked at t

eth Israel shall neit

r stretched into the future. His glance, shifting to the distance, saw the scattered dots of the disappearing buffalo

ess smile of a half-awakened child. Her consciousness had not yet fully returned, and her glance, curiously clear and liquid, rested on his without intelligence. The woman in her

he said stretching, an

answered. "I've built it

up about her shoulders and looked into her face. Meeting his eyes she broke int

d, I'm so

palm. She laughed again, and then yawned, lifting her sh

time to wake up," she

his hand pressure, and the contentment that marked her awakening was marred. But she felt in a kindly mood and did not withdraw

nset-all yellow to t

g at the flaming

loating over it, like the melted lead that

leaning nearer to spy into

think it

ply, and she drew back

" he said, his vo

ustomed. With a determination to perform her part graciously she lowered her eyelids and presented a dusky cheek. As his shoulder touched hers she felt that he trembled and was instantly seized with the antipathy that his emotion woke in her. But it was too late to withdraw. His arms closed round

Stop! I won't h

rushing off the bosom of her blouse as if he had

repeated, with heated repr

sorry to risk a repetition of the unpleasant experience. He, too, turned his glance from her, biting his lip to hide the insincerity of his smile, irritated at her unmanageableness, and in

rassment, saving them from the necessity

e keg of whisky was moved

ith a lightn

Who wants

looked un

ot a shiver on him like the ague, and he

ped to

with the rage of a disregarde

such speed and completeness that David's kiss and her anger might have taken place in another world in a pre

Big Blue. Take out the extra blankets and the medicine chest. That's in the fro

ned to so

hill's natural enough

im, not only as a lover but as a human being. Her eyes, under low-drawn brows, stared for a second into his with the unseeing i

erybody knows that"-then she looked after Daddy John. "Get

?" the young

agon, and midway between it and the fir

an find stones heat them

he ra

t when she should have turned to him for the aid he yearned to give. He could not get over the suddenness of it, and watched them forlorn

mething for yo

wered without raising her head

o her own. The little circle in which her life had always moved snapped tight upon her, leaving the lover