To the cry of "Roll out," and the snap of the long
whip, the wagon lurched into motion, the thirst-racked animals
straining doggedly as it crunched over sage stalks and dragged through
powdery hummocks. The old man walked by the wheel, the long lash of
his whip thrown afar, flashing in the upper light and descending in a
lick of flame on the mules' gray flanks. With each blow fell a phrase
of encouragement, the words of a friend who wounds and wounding himself
suffers. David rode at the rear with Susan. The two men had told him
he must ride if he died for it, and met his offended answer that he
intended to do so with sullen silence. In advance, Courant's figure
brushed between the bushes, his hair a moving patch of copper color in
the last light.
Darkness quickly gathered round them. The bowl of sky became an
intense Prussian blue that the earth reflected. In this clear, deep
color the wagon hood showed a pallid arch, and the shapes of man and
beast were defined in shadowless black. In the west a band of
lemon-color lingered, and above the stars began to prick through, great
scintillant sparks, that looked, for all their size, much farther away
than the stars of the peopled places.
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