On the Frontier eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 167 pages of information about On the Frontier.

On the Frontier eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 167 pages of information about On the Frontier.

He left the road at a point where the marsh encroached upon the meadow, familiar to him already as near the spot where he had embarked from the Chinaman’s boat the day before.  He remembered that the walls of the hacienda were distinctly visible from the tules where he had hidden all day, and he now knew that the figures he had observed near the building, which had deterred his first attempts at landing, must have been his wife and his friend.  He knew that a long tongue of the slough filled by the rising tide followed the marsh, and lay between him and the hacienda.  The sinking of his horse’s hoofs in the spongy soil determined its proximity, and he made a detour to the right to avoid it.  In doing so, a light suddenly rose above the distant horizon ahead of him, trembled faintly, and then burned with a steady lustre.  It was a light at the hacienda.  Guiding his horse half abstractedly in this direction, his progress was presently checked by the splashing of the animal’s hoofs in the water.  But the turf below was firm, and a salt drop that had spattered to his lips told him that it was only the encroaching of the tide in the meadow.  With his eyes on the light, he again urged his horse forward.  The rain lulled, the clouds began to break, the landscape alternately lightened and grew dark; the outlines of the crumbling hacienda walls that enshrined the light grew more visible.  A strange and dreamy resemblance to the long blue-grass plain before his wife’s paternal house, as seen by him during his evening rides to courtship, pressed itself upon him.  He remembered, too, that she used to put a light in the window to indicate her presence.  Following this retrospect, the moon came boldly out, sparkled upon the overflow of silver at his feet, seemed to show the dark, opaque meadow beyond for a moment, and then disappeared.  It was dark now, but the lesser earthly star still shone before him as a guide, and pushing towards it, he passed in the all-embracing shadow.

CHAPTER IV

As Mrs. Tucker, erect, white, and rigid, drove away from the tienda, it seemed to her to sink again into the monotonous plain, with all its horrible realities.  Except that there was now a new and heart-breaking significance to the solitude and loneliness of the landscape, all that had passed might have been a dream.  But as the blood came back to her cheek, and little by little her tingling consciousness returned, it seemed as if her life had been the dream, and this last scene the awakening reality.  With eyes smarting with the moisture of shame, the scarlet blood at times dyeing her very neck and temples, she muffled her lowered crest in her shawl and bent over the reins.  Bit by bit she recalled, in Poindexter’s mysterious caution and strange allusions, the corroboration of her husband’s shame and her own disgrace.  This was why she was brought hither—­the deserted wife, and abandoned confederate!  The

Copyrights
Project Gutenberg
On the Frontier from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.