Travis smiled a bit crookedly. A new religion of sorts, a priesthood with sacred and forbidden knowledge … in time a whole new life and civilization stemming from this night. The bleak cold of his early thought cut less deep. There was a different kind of adventure here.
He reached out and gathered up the bundle of the burners, glancing from Buck to Jil-Lee to Menlik. Then he stood up, the weight of the burden in his arms, the feeling of a greater weight inside him.
“Shall we go?”
To get the weapons back—that was of first importance. Maybe then he could sleep soundly, to dream of riding across the Arizona range at dawn under a blue sky with a wind in his face, a wind carrying the scent of piñon pine and sage, a wind which would never caress or hearten him again, a wind his sons and sons’ sons would never know. To dream troubled dreams, and hope in time those dreams would fade and thin—that a new world would blanket out the old. Better so, Travis told himself with defiance and determination—better so!
Colophon
The Defiant Agents
was published in 1962 by
Andre Norton.
This ebook was produced for
Standard Ebooks
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Kelson Vibber,
and is based on a transcription produced in 2008 by
Elaine Walker, Greg Weeks, Jason Isbell, and The Online Distributed Proofreading Team
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and on digital scans from the
Internet Archive.
The cover page is adapted from
Transverse Line,
a painting completed in 1923 by
Wassily Kandinsky.
The cover and title pages feature the
League Spartan and Sorts Mill Goudy
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Uncopyright
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