From the west a
wind sweet and soft was blowing, and, as she inhaled it, she wanted to
live, and she wanted all those about her to live. She wondered, if there
was not some way in which she could help.
The stout, double log cabins, rude, but full of comfort, stood in rows,
with well-trodden streets, between, then a fringe of grass around all,
and beyond that rose the palisade of stout stakes, driven deep into the
ground, and against each other. All was of the West and so was Lucy, a
tall, lithe young girl, her face tanned a healthy and becoming brown by
the sun, her clothing of home-woven red cloth, adorned at the wrists and
around the bottom of the skirt with many tiny beads of red and yellow
and blue and green, which, when she moved, flashed in the brilliant
light, like the quivering colors of a prism. She had thrust in her hair
a tiny plume of the scarlet tanager, and it lay there, like a flash of
flame, against the dark brown of her soft curls.
Where she stood she could see the water of the spring near the edge of
the forest sparkling in the sunlight, as if it wished to tantalize her,
but as she looked a thought came to her, and she acted upon it at once.
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