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Page 3
*END*THE SMALL PRINT! FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN ETEXTS*Ver.04.29.93*END*
This etext was created by Dianne Bean, Chino Valley, Arizona.
THE ROUND-UP
A Romance of Arizona
Novelized from Edmund Day's Melodrama
by John Murray and Mills Miller
Chapter
I. The Cactus Cross
II. The Heart of a Girl
III. A Woman's Loyalty
IV. The Hold-up
V. Hoover Bows to Hymen
VI. A Tangled Web
VII. Josephine Opens the Sluices
VIII. The Sky Pilot
IX. What God Hath Joined Together
X. The Piano
XI. Accusation and Confession
XII. The Land of Dead Things
XIII. The Atonement
XIV. The Round-up
XV. Peruna Pulls His Freight
XVI. Death of McKee, Disappointed Desperado
XVII. A New Deal
XVIII. Jack!
THE ROUND-UP
CHAPTER I
The Cactus Cross
Down an old trail in the Ghost Range in northwestern Mexico, just
across the Arizona border, a mounted prospector wound his way,
his horse carefully picking its steps among the broken granite
blocks which had tumbled upon the ancient path from the mountain
wall above. A burro followed, laden heavily with pack, bed-roll,
pick, frying-pan, and battered coffee-pot, yet stepping along
sure-footedly as the mountain-sheep that first formed the trail
ages ago, and whose petrified hoof-prints still remain to afford
footing for the scarcely larger hoofs of the pack-animal.
An awful stillness hung over the scene, that was broken only by
the click of hoofs of horse and burro upon the rocks, and the
clatter of the loose stones they dislodged that rolled and
skipped down the side. Not a breath of air was stirring, and the
sun blazed down from the zenith with such fierce and direct
radiation that the wayfarer needed not to observe the shadows to
note its exact position in the heavens. Singly among the broken
blocks, and in banks along the ledges, the cactus had burst under
the heat, as it were, into the spontaneous combustion of flowery
flame. To the traveler passing beside them their red blooms
blazed with the irritating superfluity of a torch-light
procession at noonday.
The trail leads down to a flat ledge which overlooks the desert,
and which is the observatory whither countless generations of
mountain-sheep have been wont to resort to survey the strange
world beneath them--with what purpose and what feelings, it
remains for some imaginative writer of animal-stories to inform
us. From the ledge to the valley below the trail is free from
obstructions, and broader, more beaten, and less devious than
above, indicating that it has been formed by the generations of
men toiling up from the valley to the natural watch-tower on the
heights. Reaching the ledge, the prospector found that what
seemed from the angle above to be an irregular pile of large
boulders was an artificial fortification, the highest wall being
toward the mountains. Entering the enclosure the prospector
dismounted, relieved his horse of its saddle and his burro of its
pack, and proceeded to prepare his midday meal. Looking for the
best place where he might light a fire, he observed, in the most
protected corner, a flat stone, marked by fire, and near it, in
the rocky ground, a pot-hole, evidently formed for grinding
maize. The ashes of ancient fires were scattered about, and in
cleaning them off his new-found hearth the man discovered a
potsherd, apparently of a native olla or water-jar, and a chipped
fragment of flint, too small to indicate whether it had formed
part of an Indian arrowhead or had dropped from an old flintlock
musket.
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