And do you recollect that dark
night when old Loco and his warriors were camped at the base of
Cochise's Stronghold, and we crept down through the velvet dark
wondering when we would be discovered, our mouths sticky with
excitement, and the little winds blowing?"
He walked up and down a half-dozen times, his breast heaving.
"It's all very well for the man who is brought up to it, and
who has seen nothing else. Case can exist in four walls; he
has been brought up to it and knows nothing different. But a
man like me--
"They wanted me to canter between hedge-row,--I who have ridden
the desert where the sky over me and the plain under me were
bigger than the Islander's universe! They wanted me to oversee
little farms--I who have watched the sun rising over half a
world! Talk of your ten thou' a year and what it'll buy! You
know, Harry, how it feels when a steer takes the slack of your
rope, and your pony sits back! Where in England can I buy that?
You know the rising and the falling of days, and the boundless
spaces where your heart grows big, and the thirst of the desert
and the hunger of the trail, and a sun that shines and fills
the sky, and a wind that blows fresh from the wide places!
Where in parcelled, snug, green, tight little England could I
buy that with ten thou'--aye, or an hundred times ten thou'?
No, no, Harry, that fortune would cost me too dear.
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