“This is an unconventional country,” he said. “Look at it, as white as snow under this summer moon.”
“It’s lovely by night,” she agreed; “but this Comanche is like a sore spot on a clean skin. It’s a blight and a disfigurement, and these noises they make after dark sound like some savage revel.”
“We’ll put them behind us for two hours or so,” he decided with finality which allowed no further argument.
As they set off toward the river he did not offer her the support of his arm, for she strode beside him with her hands swinging free, long step to his long step, not a creature of whims and shams, he knew, quite able to bear her own weight on a rougher road than that.
“Still it is unconventional,” she reflected, looking away over the flat land.
“That’s the beauty of it,” said he. “Let’s be just natural.”
They passed beyond the straggling limits of Comanche, where the town blended out into the plain in the tattered tents and road-battered wagons of the most earnest of all the home-seekers, those who had staked everything on the hope of drawing a piece of land which would serve at last as a refuge against the world’s buffeting.
Under their feet was the low-clinging sheep-sage and the running herbs of yellow and gray which seemed so juiceless and dry to the eye, but which were the provender of thousands of sheep and cattle that never 32 knew the shelter of fold or stable, nor the taste of man-grown grain or fodder, from the day of their birth to the day of their marketing. Winter and summer alike, under the parching sun, under the strangling drifts, that clinging, gray vegetation was the animals’ sole nutriment.
Behind the couple the noises of Comanche died to murmurs. Ahead of them rose the dark line of cottonwoods which stood upon the river-shore.
“I want to take another look at the Buckhorn Cañon,” said the doctor, stalking on in his sturdy, farm-bred gait.