文档介绍：WYOMING:A STORY OF THE OUTDOOR WEST
WYOMING
A STORY OF THE OUTDOOR WEST
William MacLeod Raine
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WYOMING:A STORY OF THE OUTDOOR WEST
CHAPTER 1. A DESERT
MEETING
An automobile shot out from a gash in the hills and slipped swiftly
down to the butte. Here it came to a halt on the white, dusty road, while its
occupant gazed with eager, unsated eyes on the great panorama that
stretched before her. The earth rolled in waves like a mighty sea to the
distant horizon line. From a wonderful blue sky poured down upon the
land a bath of sunbeat. The air was like wine, pure and strong, and above
the desert swam the rare, untempered light of Wyoming. Surely here was a
peace primeval, a silence unbroken since the birth of creation.
It was all new to her, and wonderfully exhilarating. The infinite roll of
plain, the distant shining mountains, the multitudinous voices of the desert
drowned in a sunlit sea of space--they were all details of the situation that
ministered to a large serenity.
And while she breathed deeply the satisfaction of it, an exploding rifle
echo shattered the stillness. With excited sputtering came the prompt
answer of a fusillade. She was new to the West; but some instinct stronger
than reason told the girl that here was no playful puncher shooting up the
scenery to ventilate his exuberance. Her imagination conceived something
more deadly; a sinister picture of men pumping lead in a grim, close-
lipped silence; a lusty plainsman, with murder in his heart, crumpling into
a lifeless heap, while the thin smoke-spiral curled from his hot rifle.
So the girl imagined the scene as she ran swiftly forward through the
pines to the edge of the butte bluff whence she might look down upon the
coulee that nestled against it. Nor had she greatly erred, for her first
sweeping glance showed her the thing she had dreaded.
In a semicircle, well back from the foot of the butte, half a dozen men
crouched in the cover of the sage-brush and