The Everlasting Whisper | Page 6

chill blue Icelandic eyes toward the spot
where he had abandoned his fallen companion.
King's first interest was centred on the ground underfoot. He went back
and forth and about the ruin of the cabin several times seeking any sign
that would tell him if Brodie and Andy Parker had been here before
him. But there were no tracks in the softer soil, no trodden-down grass.
It was very likely that no foot had come here since King's own last
October. A look of satisfaction shone for an instant in his eyes. Then,
done with this keen examination, they went with curious eagerness to

the more distant landscape. He passed through the storm-broken trees
and to the far rim of the flat, where he stood a long time staring
frowningly at one after another of the spires and ridges lifted against
the sky, probing into the mystery of the night still slumbering in the
ravines. Now his look had to do, in intent concentration, with a slope
not five hundred yards off; now with a blue-and-white summit toward
which a man might toil all day and all night before reaching.
He might have been the figure of the "Explorer," grim and hard and
determined; silent and solitary in a land of silence and solitude,
brooding over a region where "the trails run out and stop." Something
urged, something called, and his blood responded. About him rose the
voice of the endless leagues of pines in a hushed utterance which might
have been the whisper:
"Something hidden. Go and find it. Go and look behind the Ranges--
Something lost behind the Ranges. Lost and waiting for you. Go!"
He made sure that he had left no sign of his visit here, not so much as a
fallen crust of bread, caught up his pack and found the familiar way
down the cliffs, striking off toward the higher mountains and the high
pass through which he would travel to-night.

Chapter III
To have followed the pace which he set that day would have broken the
heart of any but a seasoned mountaineer. No man in these mountains
could have so much as kept him in sight, saving alone Swen Brodie,
and he was left far back yonder, miles on the other, lower, side of the
ridge. By mid-forenoon King had outstripped the springtime and was
among snow patches which grew in frequency and extent; at noon he
built his little fire on a snow crust. He crossed a raging tributary of the
American, travelling upward along the rock-bound, spray-wet gorge a
full mile before he came to the possible precarious ford. At six o'clock
he made a second fire in a bleak windy pass, surrounded by a
glimmering ghostly waste. Trees were stiff with frost; the wind

whistled and jeered through them and about sharp crags, filling the
crisp air with eerie, shuddersome music. He set his coffee to boil while
meditating that down in the Sacramento Valley, which one could
glimpse from here by day, it was stifling hot, like midsummer. He
rested by his fire with his canvas drawn up about his shoulders, smoked
his pipe, remade his pack, and went on. He counted on the moon
presently and a bed at a slightly lower altitude among the trees; to-night
Andy Parker was sleeping in his army blanket.
He crunched along over the snow crust which rarely failed him, and
though the daylight passed swiftly, the dead-white surface seemed to
hold an absorbed radiance and shed it softly. By the time he got down
to the timber-line again the moon was up. He left the country of Five
Lakes well to his left, ignoring the invitation of the trail beyond down
the tall walls of Squaw Creek cañon. He went straight down the long
pitch of the mountain, heading tenaciously toward the tiny lakelet
which, so far as he knew, had been nameless until his old friend Ben
Gaynor had built a summer home there two years ago and had
christened the pond among the trees. Lake Gloria! Mark King liked the
appellation little enough, telling himself with thorough-going unreason
that there was a silly name to fit to perfection a silly girl, but altogether
out of place to tie on to an unspoiled Sierra lake. Ben would have done
a better job in naming it Lake Vanity. Or Self-Regard. King could think
of a score of designations more to the point. For though he had never so
much as set his eyes on either Gloria or her mother, he had his own
opinion of both of them. Nor did he in the least realize that that opinion
was based rather less on actual knowledge than moulded by his own
peculiar form of jealousy, that jealousy which one time-tried friend
feels