I am going on. Think! You'll strike that
railway and in a month you will be back in New York. Don't you
imagine, when you're there, when you hear the clatter and turmoil
of it, when you see the pale crowds chivvying one another about
to pick the dollars from each other's pockets,--don't you believe
you'll long for these solitudes, the big empty places, great
possibilities, the silence? Think of it, man. What is there
beyond those mountains, I wonder?"
McCleod sighed.
"You're right," he said. "One may never get so far out again.
Our fortunes will keep, I suppose, and anyhow we ought to strike
a telegraph station in about a fortnight. We'll go right ahead,
then."
In ten days they dropped ten thousand feet. They came to a land
where their throats were always dry, where the trees and shrubs
seemed like property affairs from a theatre, where they plunged
their heads into every pool that came to wash their noses and
mouths from the red dust that seemed to choke them up. They
found tin and oil and more copper. Then, by slow stages, they
passed on to a land of great grassy plains, of blue grass, miles
and miles of it, and suddenly one day they came to the telegraph
posts, rough pine trees unstripped of their bark, with a few
sagging wires. Tavernake looked at them as Robinson Crusoe might
have looked at Man Friday's footsteps. It was the first sign of
human life which they had seen for months.
"It's a real world we are in, after all!" he sighed.
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