driver cut off in a straight line toward the south and in a thin, flashing column the Red Devils disappeared into the black country and the exhaust flares clipped out one by one.
The raised windows and grates rattled for a moment with the sudden, unpleasant chock and starting of engines and the band began to play.
“They had jewels all over them,” said the boy.
Luke wiped his face, throat and upper chest with his neckerchief. “We don’t want to hear about it,” he said.
n o one wants to hear what I got to say,” said Ma.
Day or night could not be measured by what she did or the way she dressed. Her bedding on the floor was always open and roughed as if she had just climbed wearily from it or was about to lay herself down again for a moment’s uneasy rest. She napped all through the night. The sun might be breaking or clouding over as she stood at the stove changing her dressing, reaching for the roll of bandage between the red bottle and pepper tin, peering at her forearm sore by the light of the coals. She stood on a little patch of carpet before the stove summer or winter, in the early evening or the long middle breath of the night, and wore her stocking cap and slippers, daytime dress and high socks.
“My sore’s been ailing me again,” she said.
Ma had been outlying Gov City for ten remembered years, her cooking chimney seen always smoking, a Lampson marketing for her and talking about her every week, but no one knew when or how the sore had sprung upon her arm. Because of the vermin in the chickenwings, or some recurrent bone breath in the victuals, or some flowering growth cropped up in the slough of the river bed, it never healed but gave her trouble when she stirred or rolled over. She tended it with the same frown and preoccupation as possessed the cowboy when he lanced or cauterized the discolored wound of a pit viper.
“You give it to me,” and she half turned to the Mandan to let her see. The girl sat reading a catalogue with breasts lunged against the table, oil gleaming on her black hair and spotting the red wool sweater. She licked her fingers and slowly turned the page to another smeared picture of an accordion.
“Mulge never would have let me be this way,” said Ma.
The mile long knoll of his grave mound was an incomplete mountain, a pile of new earth erupted between the bluffs, a patch, a lighter hue of brown, across the river road. It was a shoveler’s mission, the largest heap of dirt and the longest tomb of any channel impediment from the trickling source of the trouble to its mouth on the distant gulf. They had stripped the topsoil of the basin, picked at the surface and weeds, uncovered the shifting red clay for acres and finally, in the last stages of the project, been stopped at the yellow peakless rise itself. Not that they had been able to move the mountain into place and rear it foot by foot, but rather they had been unable to tear it down and had merely left it, defaced of former cliffs and ridges, and without a name. It took Luke’s seeding badly; it remained undisguised and visitors looked vainly for the excavations from which it must have come.
A few tool sheds remained below the dam. Rust-colored, barely overgrown cuts still lay along the lower banks, but the enormous center of the channel, from which the mountain had been pumped and drawn, had resumed one night its listless flat shape. It shifted as before when under water, but in currents and directions that couldbe recorded only on the seismograph by magnetic flux and by the wary, almost invisible nestings and flights of insects from one drift of remaining dead water to the next.
It was a sarcophagus of mud. It filled the gap between two lesser hills and prevented, by raising spit and shoals to sight, the flag flying traffic of river boats where a few had glittered in the night and crawled before. The dam caused to be beached the homemade leaking skiffs of ranchers whose land backed up to the mud colored
The raised windows and grates rattled for a moment with the sudden, unpleasant chock and starting of engines and the band began to play.
“They had jewels all over them,” said the boy.
Luke wiped his face, throat and upper chest with his neckerchief. “We don’t want to hear about it,” he said.
n o one wants to hear what I got to say,” said Ma.
Day or night could not be measured by what she did or the way she dressed. Her bedding on the floor was always open and roughed as if she had just climbed wearily from it or was about to lay herself down again for a moment’s uneasy rest. She napped all through the night. The sun might be breaking or clouding over as she stood at the stove changing her dressing, reaching for the roll of bandage between the red bottle and pepper tin, peering at her forearm sore by the light of the coals. She stood on a little patch of carpet before the stove summer or winter, in the early evening or the long middle breath of the night, and wore her stocking cap and slippers, daytime dress and high socks.
“My sore’s been ailing me again,” she said.
Ma had been outlying Gov City for ten remembered years, her cooking chimney seen always smoking, a Lampson marketing for her and talking about her every week, but no one knew when or how the sore had sprung upon her arm. Because of the vermin in the chickenwings, or some recurrent bone breath in the victuals, or some flowering growth cropped up in the slough of the river bed, it never healed but gave her trouble when she stirred or rolled over. She tended it with the same frown and preoccupation as possessed the cowboy when he lanced or cauterized the discolored wound of a pit viper.
“You give it to me,” and she half turned to the Mandan to let her see. The girl sat reading a catalogue with breasts lunged against the table, oil gleaming on her black hair and spotting the red wool sweater. She licked her fingers and slowly turned the page to another smeared picture of an accordion.
“Mulge never would have let me be this way,” said Ma.
The mile long knoll of his grave mound was an incomplete mountain, a pile of new earth erupted between the bluffs, a patch, a lighter hue of brown, across the river road. It was a shoveler’s mission, the largest heap of dirt and the longest tomb of any channel impediment from the trickling source of the trouble to its mouth on the distant gulf. They had stripped the topsoil of the basin, picked at the surface and weeds, uncovered the shifting red clay for acres and finally, in the last stages of the project, been stopped at the yellow peakless rise itself. Not that they had been able to move the mountain into place and rear it foot by foot, but rather they had been unable to tear it down and had merely left it, defaced of former cliffs and ridges, and without a name. It took Luke’s seeding badly; it remained undisguised and visitors looked vainly for the excavations from which it must have come.
A few tool sheds remained below the dam. Rust-colored, barely overgrown cuts still lay along the lower banks, but the enormous center of the channel, from which the mountain had been pumped and drawn, had resumed one night its listless flat shape. It shifted as before when under water, but in currents and directions that couldbe recorded only on the seismograph by magnetic flux and by the wary, almost invisible nestings and flights of insects from one drift of remaining dead water to the next.
It was a sarcophagus of mud. It filled the gap between two lesser hills and prevented, by raising spit and shoals to sight, the flag flying traffic of river boats where a few had glittered in the night and crawled before. The dam caused to be beached the homemade leaking skiffs of ranchers whose land backed up to the mud colored
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