5
It seemed to be a woman or girl, for I could see even at that distance
her skirts blown out by the brisk prairie wind. She came over the hill
as if running, and at its summit she appeared to stop as if looking for
something afar off. At that distance I could not tell whether she gazed
backward, forward, to the left or the right, but it impressed me that
she stood gazing backward over the route to the west along which she had
come. Then, it was plain, she began running down the gentle declivity
toward me, and once she fell and either lay or sat on the ground for
some time. Presently, though, she got up, and began coming on more
slowly, sometimes as if running, most of the time going from side to
side of the road as if staggering--and finally she went out of my sight,
dropping into a wide valley, to the bottom of which I could not see. It
was strange, as it appeared to me; this lone woman, the prairie, night,
and the sense of trouble; but, I thought, like most queer things, it
would have some quite simple explanation if one could see it close-by.
I made camp a few hundred yards from the road by a creek, along the
banks of which grew many willows, and some little groves of box-elders
and popples, which latter in this favorable locality grew eight or ten
feet tall, and were already breaking out their soft greenish catkins and
tender, quivering, pointed leaves: in one of these clumps I hid my
wagon, and in the midst of it I kindled my camp-fire.
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