"Grey, Zane - The Rainbow Trail" - читать интересную книгу автора (Grey Zane)

its ridge-tops showing scantier growth of sage and grass and weed. The
last ridge was a sand-dune, beautifully ribbed and scalloped and lined
by the wind, and from its knife-sharp crest a thin wavering sheet of
sand blew, almost like smoke. Shefford wondered why the sand looked
red at a distance, for here it seemed almost white. It rippled
everywhere, clean and glistening, always leading down.

Suddenly Shefford became aware of a house looming out of the bareness
of the slope. It dominated that long white incline. Grim, lonely,
forbidding, how strangely it harmonized with the surroundings! The
structure was octagon-shaped, built of uncut stone, and resembled a
fort. There was no door on the sides exposed to Shefford's gaze, but
small apertures two-thirds the way up probably served as windows and
port-holes. The roof appeared to be made of poles covered with red
earth.

Like a huge cold rock on a wide plain this house stood there on the
windy slope. It was an outpost of the trader Presbrey, of whom
Shefford had heard at Flagstaff and Tuba. No living thing appeared
in the limit of Shefford's vision. He gazed shudderingly at the
unwelcoming habitation, at the dark eyelike windows, at the sweep
of barren slope merging into the vast red valley, at the bold, bleak
bluffs. Could any one live here? The nature of that sinister valley
forbade a home there, and the, spirit of the place hovered in the
silence and space. Shefford thought irresistibly of how his enemies
would have consigned him to just such a hell. He thought bitterly and
mockingly of the narrow congregation that had proved him a failure in
the ministry, that had repudiated his ideas of religion and immortality
and God, that had driven him, at the age of twenty-four, from the
calling forced upon him by his people. As a boy he had yearned to make
himself an artist; his family had made him a clergyman; fate had made
him a failure. A failure only so far in his life, something urged him
to add--for in the lonely days and silent nights of the desert he had
experienced a strange birth of hope. Adventure had called him, but
it was a vague and spiritual hope, a dream of promise, a nameless
attainment that fortified his wilder impulse.

As he rode around a corner of the stone house his horse snorted and
stopped. A lean, shaggy pony jumped at sight of him, almost displacing
a red long-haired blanket that covered an Indian saddle. Quick thuds
of hoofs in sand drew Shefford's attention to a corral made of peeled
poles, and here he saw another pony.

Shefford heard subdued voices. He dismounted and walked to an open
door. In the dark interior he dimly descried a high counter, a
stairway, a pile of bags of flour, blankets, and silver-ornamented
objects, but the persons he had heard were not in that part of the
house. Around another corner of the octagon-shaped wall he found
another open door, and through it saw goat-skins and a mound of dirty
sheep-wool, black and brown and white. It was light in this part of