d knowingly.
At that moment the father came out of the hole in the bank. He wore no
hat, and his thick, iron-grey hair was brushed straight back from his
forehead. It was so long that it bushed out behind his ears, and made
him look like the old portraits I remembered in Virginia. He was
tall and slender, and his thin shoulders stooped. He looked at us
understandingly, then took grandmother's hand and bent over it. I
noticed how white and well-shaped his own hands were. They looked calm,
somehow, and skilled. His eyes were melancholy, and were set back
deep under his brow. His face was ruggedly formed, but it looked like
ashes--like something from which all the warmth and light had died out.
Everything about this old man was in keeping with his dignified manner.
He was neatly dressed. Under his coat he wore a knitted grey vest, and,
instead of a collar, a silk scarf of a dark bronze-green, carefully
crossed and held together by a red coral pin. While Krajiek was
translating for Mr. Shimerda, Antonia came up to me and held out her
hand coaxingly. In a moment we were running up the steep drawside
together, Yulka trotting after us.
When we reached the level and could see the gold tree-tops, I pointed
toward them, and Antonia laughed and squeezed my hand as if to tell me
how glad she was I had come. We raced off toward Squaw Creek and did not
stop until the ground itself stopped--fell away before us so abruptly
that the next step would have been out into the tree-tops. We stood
panting on the edge of the ravine, looking down at the trees and bushes
that grew below us. The wind was so strong that I had to hold my hat on,
and the girls' skirts were blown out before them. Antonia seemed to like
it; she held her little sister by the hand and chattered away in that
language which seemed to me spoken so much more rapidly than mine. She
looked at me, her eyes fairly blazing with things she could not say.
'Name? What name?' she asked, touching me on the shoulder. I told her
my name, and she repeated it after me and made Yulka say it. She pointed
into the gold cottonwood tree behind whose top we stood and said again,
'What name?'
We sat down and made a nest in the long red grass. Yulka curled up like
a baby rabbit and played with a grasshopper. Antonia pointed up to the
sky and questioned me with her glance. I gave her the word, but she was
not satisfied and pointed to my eyes. I told her, and she repeated the
word, making i
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