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The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales by Bret Harte
page 67 of 522 (12%)
had licked his dusty boots and curled himself up at his feet, and lay
there, blinking one eye in the sunlight, with a simulation of
dissipation that was ingenious and dog-like in its implied flattery of
the unconscious man beside him.

Meanwhile the shadows of the pine-trees had slowly swung around until
they crossed the road, and their trunks barred the open meadow with
gigantic parallels of black and yellow. Little puffs of red dust,
lifted by the plunging hoofs of passing teams, dispersed in a grimy
shower upon the recumbent man. The sun sank lower and lower, and still
Sandy stirred not. And then the repose of this philosopher was
disturbed, as other philosophers have been, by the intrusion of an
unphilosophical sex.

"Miss Mary," as she was known to the little flock that she had just
dismissed from the log schoolhouse beyond the pines, was taking her
afternoon walk. Observing an unusually fine cluster of blossoms on the
azalea-bush opposite, she crossed the road to pluck it, picking her
way through the red dust, not without certain fierce little shivers of
disgust and some feline circumlocution. And then she came suddenly
upon Sandy!

Of course she uttered the little staccato cry of her sex. But when she
had paid that tribute to her physical weakness she became overbold and
halted for a moment,--at least six feet from this prostrate monster,
--with her white skirts gathered in her hand, ready for flight. But
neither sound nor motion came from the bush. With one little foot she
then overturned the satirical headboard, and muttered "Beasts!"--an
epithet which probably, at that moment, conveniently classified in her
mind the entire male population of Red Gulch. For Miss Mary, being
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