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Lone Pine Says Howdy

I groaned in my seat. Umpteen times is how many times we had driven this road we were on. Looking back now, I can postulate that it might have become the slender thread that bound us to each other. And now this. I was tired of the jive, tired of Dolores. Hence, when I saw the welcome outlines, through the windshield, of the mound—red, cylindrical, and almost perfectly symmetrical—I said, with a gusto that was not entirely feigned, "There it is. The mound."