Calumet watched it with eyes that glowed bitterly and balefully. Half
an hour later, when he reached the river and the pony clattered down
the rocky slope, plunged its head deeply into the stream and drank with
eager, silent draughts, Calumet swung himself crossways in the saddle,
fumbled for a moment at his slicker, and drew out a battered tin cup.
Leaning over, he filled the cup with water, tilted his head back and
drank. The blur in the white sky caught his gaze and held it. His
eyes mocked, his lips snarled.
"You damned greaser sneak!" he said. "Followed me fifty miles!" A
flash of race hatred glinted his eyes. "I wouldn't let no damned
greaser eagle get me, anyway!"
The pony had drunk its fill. Calumet returned the tin cup to the
slicker and swung back into the saddle. Refreshed, the pony took the
opposite slope with a rush, emerging from the river upon a high plateau
studded with fir balsam and pine. Bringing the pony to a halt, Calumet
turned in the saddle and looked somberly behind him.
For two days he had been fighting the desert, and now it lay in his
rear, a mystic, dun-colored land of hot sandy waste and silence;
brooding, menacing, holding out its threat of death--a vast natural
basin breathing and pulsing with mystery, rimmed by remote mountains
that seemed tenuous and thin behind the ever-changing misty films that
spread from horizon to horizon.
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