He twisted her violently on her face, knelt on her back,
and, with the short piece of hard rope the cowboy always carries
to "hog-tie" cattle, he lashed her wrists together. Then he
arose panting, his square black beard rising and falling with the
rise and fall of his great chest.
Estrella had screamed again and again until her face had been
fairly ground into the alkali. There she had choked and
strangled and gasped and sobbed, her mind nearly unhinged with
terror. She kept appealing to him in a hoarse voice, but could
get no reply, no indication that he had even heard. This
terrified her still more. Brent Palmer cursed steadily and
accurately, but the man did not seem to hear him either.
The tempest bad broken in Buck Johnson's soul. When he had
touched Estrella he had, for the first time, realised what he had
lost. It was not the woman--her he despised. But the dreams!
All at once he knew what they had been to him--he understood how
completely the very substance of his life had changed in response
to their slow soul-action. The new world had been blasted--the
old no longer existed to which to return.
Buck Johnson stared at this catastrophe until his sight blurred.
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