Jean of the Lazy A by B. M. Bower
page 45 of 305 (14%)
page 45 of 305 (14%)
![]() | ![]() |
|
glare, and she was riding on one stirrup and letting the
other foot swing free, and she was whirling her quirt round and round, cartwheel fashion, and whistling an air that every one knows,--and putting in certain complicated variations of her own. At the gate she dismounted without ever missing a note, gave the warped stake a certain twist and jerk which loosened the wire loop so that she could slip it easily over the post, passed through and dragged the gate with her, dropping it flat upon the ground beside the trail. There was no stock anywhere in the coulee, and she would save a little trouble by leaving the gate open until she came out on her way home. She stepped aside to inspect the meadow lark's nest cunningly hidden under a wild rosebush, and then mounted and went on to the stable, still whistling carelessly. She turned Pard into the shed where she invariably left him when she came to the Lazy A, and went on up the grass-grown path to the house. She had the preoccupied air of one who meditates deeply upon things apart; as a matter of fact, she had glanced down the coulee to its wide-open mouth, and had thrilled briefly at the wordless beauty of the green spread of the plain and the hazy blue sweep of the mountains, and had come suddenly into the poetic mood. She had even caught a phrase,--"The lazy line of the watchful hills," it was,--and she was trying to fit it into a verse, and to find something beside "rills" that would rhyme with |
|