Then, for ranch house, there was a single room
cabin, its walls of heavy logs from the hills at the head of the Big
Little River, its door of great thick planks rough and nail studded, its
roof of shakes. A hundred yards from it, at the foot of the knoll upon
which the ranch house stood, was a similar cabin, a dozen feet longer,
serving as the men's bunk house.
Big Little River wound about the foot of the knoll, separating
Thornton's cabin from the bunk house, three or four feet deep here and
spanned by a crude footbridge. In its windings it made a sort of
horseshoe about the knoll so that looking out from the door of the
cattle man's cabin one saw the sluggish water to east, west and north.
Upon the third morning after his return to the range Thornton rose
early, scowled sleepily at the little alarm clock whose strident clamour
had startled him out of his sleep at four o'clock, kicked off his
pajamas and with towel in hand started down to the river for his morning
plunge. Subconsciously he noted a scrap of white paper lying upon the
hewn log which served as doorstep, but he paid no heed to it. He had his
dip, diving from the big rock from which most mornings of the year he
dived into the deepest part of the stream; and in a little came back
through the brightening daylight rosy and tingling and with the last
webs of sleep washed out of his brain.
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