By the time all these details were settled the pale moonlight was shot
through with the rose of dawn. Then, rapidly, the mountains lifted into
view, range beyond range, all their gullies deep blue and purple, and here
and there sharp triangles of snow. There was not a cloud, not a trace of
mist, and through the crisp, thin air the vision carried as if through a
telescope. They could count the trees on the upper ridges; and that while
the floor of the valley was still in shadow. This in turn grew brilliant,
and everywhere the sage brush glittered like foliage carved in gray-green
quartz.
It was then that they saw Dan Barry, while the dawn was still around them,
and before the sun pushed up in the east above the mountains. He came
winding down the bridle path with the dawn glittering on the side of Satan,
and a dark, swift form spiriting on ahead.
"Look at him!" muttered Sliver Waldron. "The damned wolf is a scout. See
him nose around that hummock? Watch him smell behind that bush. The black
devil!"
Bart, in fact, wove a loose course before his master, running here and
there to all points of vantage, as if he knew that danger lurked ahead, but
where he came close, with only the narrow passage between the cliffs, he
seemed to make up his animal brain that there could be no trouble in so
constricted a place, and darted straight ahead.
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