Page:Ritchie - Trails to Two Moons.djvu/128

, virginal in its fleckless beauty. Clean as the sea—like a sea caught and frozen in agitation—in this billowy infinity of brown and tawny and cinnabar red. Away and away, more than a hundred miles as man measures them, lie the purple headlands of the Black Hills. In nearer distance, yet two days' riding, the broken thumbs of Pumpkin Buttes push up from a saline desert; the telescopic atmosphere brings their serrated flanks into high relief; you see the runnels of winter's torrents traced in longitudes from blunt crown to spreading base of each butte. For the rest, north and south and east, just wave upon wave of grassed land, burned the color of a panther's coat by summer sun. Where the waves break into higher crests stretch lines of mesas, wind sculptured into fantastic cathedral columns. Meandering stream courses are threads of burnished silver wire, intermeshed, looped one within the other to make a broader strand, which is Powder River.

A clean world, a sweet world that Big Country! But on this day in June—the day when Zang Whistler and Hilma Ring rode together toward the Teapot Spout—somewhere in those interminable folds of warm brown earth