It was the hottest hour of the
day. The animals strained at their harness with lolling tongues and
white-rimmed eyeballs, their sweat making tracks on the dust. To
lighten the wagon Daddy John walked beside it, plodding on in his
broken moccasins, now and then chirruping to Julia. The girl rode
behind him, her blouse open at the neck, her hair clinging in a black
veining to her bedewed temples. Several times he turned back to look
at her as the only other female of the party to be encouraged. When
she caught his eye she nodded as though acknowledging the salutation of
a passerby, her dumbness an instinctive hoarding of physical force.
The red rock came in sight, a nicked edge across the distance. As they
approached, it drew up from the plain in a series of crumpled points
like the comb of a rooster. The detail of the intervening space was
lost in the first crepuscular softness, and they saw nothing but a
stretch of darkening purple from which rose the scalloped crest painted
in strange colors. Courant trotted forward crying a word of hope, and
they pricked after him to where the low bulwark loomed above the
plain's swimming mystery.
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