Page:Cherokee Trails (1928).pdf/176

 resistance. It was worm-crooked and muddy from recent rain, no wider than the tread of a wagon, hub-marks and axle-grease on the bushes along the edges.

Here a considerable forest of elm, hackberry, maple, walnut and other deciduous trees common to that latitude, skirted the river, grapevines and greenbrier clambering among them. It was a dank, nettle-grown, brush-choked piece of woods, parts of it impenetrable as a tropical jungle. Here and there came a break, where pawpaw bushes dropped their pale yellow leaves. The ground under them was covered with their insipid fruit, upon which raccoons and oppossums had fed, the souring remnants setting up a smell like a brewery.

This way the thieves had gone, sometime the evening past. Simpson followed the muddy road with caution that made his gait slow. He did not care to run headlong into the band, or anybody at all in that stretch of depressing woods, where it was so still and deserted not even a bluejay hopped from branch to branch ahead of him to herald his passing.

He had not encountered a habitation since early yesterday afternoon. That was the little sod hut of some misanthrope, Simpson thought, who had withdrawn himself as far from the interference of his kind as he could and yet not quite cut the line of communication which the most ardent hermit usually finds indispensable.

Here in the Nation he knew he was riding through the leased lands. He had seen many cattle, spread wide over the beautiful grazing lands, as cattle feed when left to themselves. Sometimes he passed a cow and calf, apparently alone in an expanse of pasture that would have