The impetus
of the descent carried them into the chill, purling current. Man and
beast plunged in, laved in it, drank it, and then lay by it resting,
spent and inert.
They camped where a grove of alders twinkled in answer to the swift,
telegraphic flashes of the stream. Under these the doctor pitched his
tents, the hammering of the pegs driving through the sounds of man's
occupation into the quietude that lapped them like sleeping tides. The
others hung about the center of things where wagons and mess chests, pans
and fires, made the nucleus of the human habitation.
Susan, sitting on a box, with a treasure of dead branches at her feet,
waited yet a space before setting them in the fire form. She was sunk in
the apathy of the body surrendered to restoring processes. The men's
voices entered the channels of her ears and got no farther. Her vision
acknowledged the figure of Leff nearby sewing up a rent in his coat, but
her brain refused to accept the impression. Her eye held him in a heavy
vacuity, watched with a trancelike fixity his careful stitches and the
armlong stretch of the drawn thread.
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