The silence of the waning afternoon
breathed hateful portent. It terrified Jane. When had silence
been so infernal?
"She's--only--strayed--out--of earshot," faltered Jane, looking
at Lassiter.
Pale, rigid as a statue, the rider stood, not in listening,
searching posture, but in one of doomed certainty. Suddenly he
grasped Jane with an iron hand, and, turning his face from her
gaze, he strode with her from the knoll.
"See--Fay played here last--a house of stones an' sticks....An'
here's a corral of pebbles with leaves for hosses," said
Lassiter, stridently, and pointed to the ground. "Back an' forth
she trailed here....See, she's buried somethin'--a dead
grasshopper--there's a tombstone... here she went, chasin' a
lizard--see the tiny streaked trail...she pulled bark off this
cottonwood...look in the dust of the path--the letters you taught
her--she's drawn pictures of birds en' hosses an' people....Look,
a cross! Oh, Jane, your cross!"
Lassiter dragged Jane on, and as if from a book read the meaning
of little Fay's trail. All the way down the knoll, through the
shrubbery, round and round a cottonwood, Fay's vagrant fancy left
records of her sweet musings and innocent play. Long had she
lingered round a bird-nest to leave therein the gaudy wing of a
butterfly. Long had she played beside the running stream sending
adrift vessels freighted with pebbly cargo.
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