She looked back at the fire, quiet, unflurried, then slowly raised her
lids. Courant had moved his pipe and the obscuring film of smoke was
gone. Across the red patch of embers his eyes gazed steadily at her
with the familiar gleam of derision. Her tenderness died as a flame
under a souse of water, and an upwelling of feeling that was almost
hatred, rose in her against the strange man.
CHAPTER IV
The last fording of the river had been made, and from the summit of the
Red Buttes they looked down on the long level, specked with sage and
flecked with alkaline incrustings, that lay between them and the
Sweetwater. Across the horizon the Wind River mountains stretched a
chain of majestic, snowy shapes. Desolation ringed them round, the
swimming distances fusing with the pallor of ever-receding horizons,
the white road losing itself in the blotting of sage, red elevations
rising lonely in extending circles of stillness. The air was so clear
that a tiny noise broke it, crystal-sharp like the ring of a smitten
glass. And the sense of isolation was intensified as there was no
sound from anywhere, only a brooding, primordial silence that seemed to
have remained unbroken since the first floods drained away.
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