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Peaceful Hart must have had a streak of poetry soainst the bluff; hollowed it out froold, and let the big spring fill it full and seek an outlet at the far end, where it slid away under a little stone bridge He planted the pond with rainbow trout, and on the rew until they threatened to reach up and tear ragged holes in the drifting clouds Their slender shadows lay, like gigantic fingers, far up the bluff when the sun sank low in the afternoon
Behind the thele which surrounded the house, and in su creek whispering through the grove and away to where it was defiled by tra hoofs in the corrals and pastures beyond, and with the roses which Phoebe Hart kept abloo--birds which soebrush plains and foregathered there, Peaceful Hart's ranch betrayed his secret longing for girls, as if he had unconsciously planned it for the daughters he had been denied
It was an ideal place for haht dream their way to worew old watching five full-blooded boys clicking their heels unroether as they roosted upon the porch, and threw cigarette stubs at the water lilies while they wrangled a their blankets out into the broody dusk of the grove when the nights were hot, and heard theirunder their "tarps" because of thelike a stricken harp string with their song
They liked the place well enough There were plenty of shady places to lie and s up its tiny tube Sometimes, when there was a dance, they would choose the best of Phoebe's roses to decorate their horses' bridles; and perhaps their hatbands, also Peaceful would then suck harder than ever at his pipe, and his faded blue eyes would wander pathetically about the little paradise of his , as if he wondered whether, after all, it had been worth while
A tight picket fence, built in three unswerving lines froainst a bowlder on the eastern rih the ranch, down that to the farthest tree of the grove, then back to the bluff again, shut in that tribute to the sentimental side of Peaceful's nature Outside the fence dwelt sturdier, Western realities