They stood a compact silhouette, clear in the luminous starlight. The
crack in the canvas that covered the wagon back widened and the eye
that had been watching them, stared bright and wide, as if all the life
of the feeble body had concentrated in that one organ of sense. The
hands, damp and trembling, drew the canvas edges closer, but left space
enough for the eye to dwell on this vision of a shattered world. It
continued to gaze as Susan slid from the encircling arms, dropped from
her horse, and came running forward, stumbling on the fallen bushes, as
she ran panting out the old servant's name. Then it went back to the
mountain man, a black shape in the loneliness of the night.
CHAPTER V
A slowly lightening sky, beneath it the transparent sapphire of the
desert wakening to the dawn, and cutting the blue expanse the line of
the new trail. A long butte, a bristling outline on the paling north,
ran out from a crumpled clustering of hills, and the road bent to meet
it. The air came from it touched with a cooling freshness, and as they
pressed toward it they saw the small, swift shine of water, a little
pool, grass-ringed, with silver threads creeping to the sands.
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