Page:Son of the wind.djvu/128

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SON OF THE WIND

of the cañon, were constant against the sky. Sometimes, with a wave of the arm toward them, she pointed out a peak, a tree, or a contortion of stone giving them their names. "There is Mount Wendel! That is Barney's Sword over there! That is the Witches' Well!" But she did not cry out upon their beauty or strangeness, nor call upon him to admire, any more than she would have remarked upon the appearance of friends she was introducing to him. She only looked at these things, and seemed to become more informed with their beauty, and more happy. She put back her hat, and the wind loosened the short locks of her hair. Her riding-skirt fluttered like a little flag.

Upon the curtain of the male landscape, sculptural, angular, definite, whose subtleties were of mass, and the relation of mass, so large they escaped the eye, she, with her flowing lines, and the curl of her body in the side-saddle, looked like a small runaway wisp. To see her now he could not believe that she had ever rattled dishes in a pan, or bound a dusting-cap around her head. She had changed like the dryad escaped from her tree, and the farther they entered into the wilderness of hills, the more wildly she seemed to enter into the mood of motion. They raced on the level, and around the sharp lips of declivities, the chestnut—the swifter—forging

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