| This land had lain unchanged over a thousand years, marked only by the game trails, by the buffalo wallows, by the fleeting pause of an Indian village upon its vastness. Now a new scar lay upon it, a two-track road, winding ever westward toward the distant elusiveness of snow-clad mountain ranges. The coach that ran down this rutted road, raising a thin plume of dust behind, was no glittering, yellow-wheeled thing of beauty. Its hardwood sides had weathered to a dingy gray, and the grain stood out from the sandblasting of prairie storm, from the pitiless erosion of mud and water. |
| The painted legend of ownership, defaced by the same forces that had dimmed the glory of the Troy's first beauty, announced that it belonged to the line of Forest Overland, Denver City, and Auraria, or abbreviated, the F. O., D. C., & A. Four passengers rattled about inside the shell of the rocking coach, and of these only Cole Estes still held his temper in check, still could contain the irascibility and ill-humor that a week's jolting travel over the world's roughest roads could engender in even the gentlest of humans. |
| Another of these four was a young woman. She sat directly across from Cole, and she had fallen into a numbed and exhausted stupor. This merciful unconsciousness robbed her of arrogant imperiousness, of consciousness of her own dazzling beauty, things that were so prominent in her when she was awake. Her long lashes lay against smooth cheeks, and her full lips, relaxed this way, were soft and strangely inviting. Beneath the heavy material of her woolen traveling dress, firm |
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