Читать книгу Nameless River онлайн

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Here also, were the mysterious fastnesses of Blue Stone Cañon, its perpendicular walls of eroded rock cut by seam and fissure, its hollow aisles resonant always of the murmurous stream that tumbled through them.

Nance loved the cañon. She liked to climb among its boulders, to whip its frequent pools for the trout that hung in their moving smoothness, to listen to the thousand voices that seemed always whispering and talking. They were made of fairy stuff and madness, these voices. If one sat still and listened long enough he could swear that they were real, that strange concourses discussed the secrets of the spheres. On the hottest days of summer the cañon was cool, for a wind drew always through it from its unknown head somewhere in the Deep Hearts themselves far to the north and east. Buckskin felt the mysterious influence of the soundful silence, pricking his ears, listening, holding his breath to let it out in snorts, and Nance laughed at his uneasiness.

“Buckskin,” she said one day, as she lay stretched at length on a flat rock beside a boiling riffle, “you’re a bundle of nerves, a natural-born finder of fears. There isn’t a thing bigger or uglier than yourself in all the cañon—unless it’s a panther skulking up in the branches, and he wouldn’t come near for a fortune—though what could be fortune to a cougar, I wonder?” she went on to herself, smiling at the strip of sky that topped the frowning rimrock, “only a full belly, I guess—the murderer.”