Produced by Avinash Kothare, Juliet Sutherland, Charles
Franks and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
The sun was hanging low in the clear blue over the prairie, as tworiders hurried their ponies along a blind trail toward a distantrange of purple hills that lay like sleepy watchers along the banksof the Red River.
The beasts must have ridden far, for their flanks were white withfoam, and their riders were splashed with froth and mud.
"The day is nearly done, mon ami," said one, stretching out his armand measuring the height of the sun from the horizon. "How red it is;and mark these blood-stains upon its face! It gives warning to thetyrants who oppress these fair plains; but they cannot read thesigns."
There was not a motion anywhere in all the heavens, and the onlysound that broke the stillness was the dull trample of the ponies'hoofs upon the sod. On either side was the wide level prairie,covered with thick, tall grass, through which blazed the purple,crimson and garnet blooms, of vetch and wild pease. The tiger lily,too, rose here and there like a sturdy queen of beauty with its greatterra cotta petals, specked with umber-brown. Here and there, also,upon the mellow level, stood a clump of poplars or white oaks—primlike virgins without suitors, with their robes drawn close aboutthem; but when over the unmeasured plain the wind blew, they bowedtheir heads gracefully, as a company of eastern girls when the kingcommands.
As the two horsemen rode silently around one of these clumps, theresuddenly came through the hush the sound of a girl's voice singing.The song was exquisitely worded and touching, and the singer's voicewas sweet and limpid as the notes of a bobolink. They marvelled muchwho the singer might be, and proposed that both should leave the pathand join the unknown fair one. Dismounting, they fastened theirhorses in the shelter of the poplars, and proceeded on foot towardthe point whence the singing came. A few minutes walk brought the twobeyond a small poplar grove, and there, upon a fallen tree-bole, inthe delicious cool of the afternoon, they saw the songstress sitting.She was a maiden of about eighteen years, and her soft, sil