Harper's Round Table, September 22, 1896 — John Shaqi
Harper's Round Table, September 22, 1896Various
Science
Harper's Round Table, September 22, 1896
Various
Children's periodicals
He looked at his watch and we waited. For a long time the roar kept up,
occasionally dying away as the train probably went through a deep cut or
behind a hill. It gradually increased in volume, till at last it seemed
as if the train must certainly be within a hundred yards. Still it did
not appear, and the sound grew louder and louder. But at the end of
thirty-five minutes it came around the curve in sight and thundered by,
a long freight train, and making more noise, it seemed, than any train
ever made before.
"That's where it was," exclaimed Jack. "At Cody, twelve miles from here,
and we first heard it, I don't know how far beyond. If I ever go into
the telephone business I'll keep away from the sand hills. A man here
ought to be able to hold a pleasant chat with a neighbor two miles off,
and by speaking up loud ask the postmaster ten miles away if there is
any mail for him."
We were off ploughing through the sand again early the next morning. We
could not give the horses quite all the water they wanted, but we did
the best we could. We were in the heart of the hills all day. There were
simply thousands of the great sand drifts in every direction. Buffalo
bones half buried were becoming numerous. We saw several coyotes, or
prairie wolves, skulking about, but we shot at them without success. We
got water at Cody, and pressed on. In the afternoon we sighted some
antelope looking cautiously over the crest of a sand billow. Ollie
mounted the pony and I took my rifle, and we went after them, while Jack
kept on with the wagon. They retreated, and we followed them a mile or
more back from the trail, winding among the drifts and attempting to get
near enough for a shot. But they were too wary for us. At last we
mounted a hill rather higher than the rest, and saw them scampering away
a mile or more to the northwest. We were surprised more by something
which we saw still on beyond them, and that was a little pond of water
deep down between two great ridges of sand.
"I didn't expect to see a lake in this country," said Ollie.
I studied the lay of the land a moment, and said: "I think it's simply a
place where the wind has scooped out the sand down below the water-line
and it has filled up. The wind has dug a well, that's all. You know the
operator at Georgia told us the wells here were shallow--that there's
plenty of water down a short distance."
We could see that there was considerable grass and quite an oasis around
the pond. But in every other direction there was nothing but sand
billows, all scooped out on their northwest sides where the fierce winds
of winter had gnawed at them. The afternoon sun was sinking, and every
dune cast a dark shadow on the light yellow of the sand, making a great
landscape of glaring light covered with black spots. A coyote sat on a
buffalo skull on top of the next hill and looked at us. A little owl
flitted by and disappeared in one of the shadows.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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