The girl threw her lassoo at him, breaking out into unrestrained youthful laughter that displayed all her sharp young teeth; and automatically Richard moved his head to dodge the descending circles of rope.
“I must be asleep,” he thought. “There’s no use trying to work tonight. Well, let’s go to bed.”
But before he went to sleep, he saw the whole camp spread out before him, and looked down on it from a height in the sunset, just as when Celinda, on her horse, had been beside him.
But this time the ground below was dark, and on the blue background of the sky, pierced with lights, an apparition grew before him, a woman, of a grave beauty, with stars in her hair, and on her dark tunic, a woman of great size who spread out her arms, plucking in the darkness the dreams that grow in the wide meadows of the infinite, and scattering a rain of soft fragrant petals over the earth.... It was Night herself comforting with dreams the restless striving exiles of that faraway Patagonian settlement....
But, as Richard Watson was young, the dewiest, freshest petals were for him; as they touched him he shrank away, and then felt a terror lest there should be no more; for the petals that startled him even as they caressed were the first dreams of youthful love.
CHAPTER VI
A GROUP of children playing on the “main street,” so-called, burst into shouts of astonishment as they caught sight of the coach which three times a week made the trip from the dam to Fuerte Sarmiento, for it presented an extraordinary appearance.
These little ragamuffins, busy with their games in the ruts and holes of the highway, presented all the racial diversities characteristic of the settlement’s population. There were white children shuffling about in their elders’ cast-off shoes, their small forms lost in the baggy folds of their fathers’ trousers; and there were half-breed children whose dress had been simplified to a mere shirt, short enough to expose their little copper-colored bellies to the air.
As the travellers who arrived at the dam had rarely been known to bring anything with them in the way of baggage save a canvas sack in which was heaped whatever clothing they possessed, the young inhabitants were very naturally excited and astonished at sight of the trunks and boxes heaped on the top of the mail coach, as, drawn by four lean and clay-spattered nags, it rattled up the road. So high was the pile of luggage roped on to the coach roof that, as the stage lurched into and out of the ruts of the clay road, the whole structure tipped over at such an angle that it seemed about to upset.
The men who were out of work, attracted by the novel sight, stood watching from the doorway of the tavern. The coach stopped finally in front of the frame house occupied by Watson, who came out in front of his door, his servants peering from the doorway behind him.