It was late in the afternoon when he saw far ahead of him the clump of
cottonwoods near the warm springs, very near his home. Often he had come
to these old cottonwoods, an oasis of timber lost in the great tundras,
and he had built himself a little camp among them. He loved the place.
It had seemed to him that now and then he must visit the forlorn trees
to give them cheer and comradeship. His father's name was carved in the
bole of the greatest of them all, and under it the date and day when the
elder Holt had discovered them in a land where no man had gone before.
And under his father's name was his mother's, and under that, his own.
He had made of the place a sort of shrine, a green and sweet-flowered
tabernacle of memories, and its bird-song and peace in summer and the
weird aloneness of it in winter had played their parts in the making of
his soul. Through many months he had anticipated this hour of his
home-coming, when in the distance he would see the beckoning welcome of
the old cottonwoods, with the rolling foothills and frosted peaks of the
Endicott Mountains beyond. And now he was looking at the trees and the
mountains, and something was lacking in the thrill of them. He came up
from the west, between two willow ridges through which ran the little
creek from the warm springs, and he was within a quarter of a mile of
them when something stopped him in his tracks.
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