Читать книгу Nameless River онлайн

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Rainbow Cliff, grim guardian of the Upper Country and the Deep Heart hills themselves, supposed to be impassable in all its length, dark in the early day but gleaming afar with all the colors of the spectrum when the sun dropped over toward the west at noon. It was this gorgeous radiance, caused by the many shades of the weathered stone, which had given the battlement its name. No man was ever known to have scaled the cliff—save and except John Allison, found dead at its foot two years back—for the giant spine was alike on both sides. Men from the Upper Country had penetrated the Deep Hearts to its northern base, but there they had stopped, to circle its distant ends, void of the secrets they had hoped to wrest from it.

And Kate Cathrew lived under it, a strange, half-sybaritic woman, running her cattle on the slopes of Mystery, riding after them like any man, standing in at round-up, branding, beef-gathering, her keen eyes missing nothing, her methods high-handed. Her riders obeyed her lightest word, though they were mostly of a type that few men would care to handle, hard-featured, close-lipped, sharp-eyed, hard riders and hard drinkers, as all the world of the Deep Hearts knew.