TIOBA
AND OTHER TALES
By Arthur Colton
With a Frontispiece by A. B. Frost
New York
Henry Holt And Company
1903
Original
Original
Original
DEDICATED TO
A. G. BRINSMADE
CONTENTS
TIOBA
FROM among the birches and pines, where we pitched our moving tent, you looked over the flat meadow-lands; and through these went a river, slow and almost noiseless, wandering in the valley as if there were no necessity of arriving anywhere at appointed times. “What is the necessity?” it said softly to any that would listen. And there was none; so that for many days the white tent stood among the trees, overlooking the haycocks in the meadows. It was enough business in hand to study the philosophy and the subtle rhetoric of Still River.
Opposite rose a strangely ruined mountain-side. There was a nobly-poised head and plenteous chest, the head three thousand feet nearer the stars—which was little enough from their point of view, no doubt, but to us it seemed a symbol of something higher than the stars, something beyond them forever waiting and watching.
From its feet upward half a mile the mountain was one raw wound. The shivered roots and tree-trunks stuck out helples