Dust

Dust Tiny particles that consist of soil, pollen, organic materials, waste matter, and other debris that are wrestled from their resting spot and carried into the atmosphere by weather, wind flow, and other events. Dust in //The Unvanquished// is a product of the dirt that covers the flat Mississippi landscape. Its formation tells of travel and movement.

**Dust-colored **: “We were facing one another at scarcely arms’ length, to the other each invisible in the furious slow jerking of the flung dust, yelling ‘Kill the bastuds! Kill them! Kill them!’ when her voice seemed to descend upon us like an enormous hand, flattening the very dust which we had raised, leaving us now visible to one another, dust-colored ourselves to the eyes and still in the act of throwing: ‘You, Bayard! You, Ringo!’ ” (U 7) **Dustcaked **: “We watched them—the big gaunt horse almost the color of smoke, lighter in color than the dust which had gathered and caked on his wet hide where they had crossed at the ford three miles away, coming up the drive at a steady gait which was not a walk and not a run, as if he had held it all the way from Tennessee because there was a need to encompass earth which abrogated sleep or rest and relegated to some insulated bourne of perennial and pointless holiday so trivial a thing as galloping; and Father damp too from the ford, his boots dark and dustcaked too, the skirts of his weathered gray coat shades darker than the breast and back and sleeves where the tarnished buttons and the frayed braid of his field offer’s rank glinted dully, the sabre hanging loose yet rigid at his side as if it were too heavy to jounce or perhaps were attached to the living thigh itself and took no more motion from the horse than he did.” (U 8-9) **Dust **: “Mine and Ringo’s horses could go pretty well too; when I looked back the other were a good piece behind, out of our dust.” (U 65) **Dust **: “The smoke boiled up, yellow and slow and turning coppercolored in the sunset like dust; it was like dust from a road above the fee that made it and then went on, boiling up slow and hanging and waiting to die away.” (U 75) **Sweat-caking dust **: “It was like we all heard it at the same time—we in the wagon and on the horse, they all around us in the sweat-caking dust.” (U 104).