The Freebooters of the Wilderness | Page 5

to homestead free land, about the
Federal Government putting up a fence to keep the settler off. That
fellow--that fellow in the first shack can't speak a word of English.
Smelter brought a train load of 'em in here; and they've all homesteaded
the big timbers, a thousand of 'em, foreigners, given homesteads in the
name of the free American citizen. Have you seen anything about it in
the newspaper? Well--I guess not. It isn't a news feature. We're all full

up about the great migration to Canada. We like to be given a gold
brick and the glad hand. Of course, they'll farm that land. One man
couldn't clear that big timber for a homestead in a hundred years. Of
course, they are not homesteading free timber for the big Smelter. Of
course not! They didn't loot the redwoods of California that way--two
hundred thousand acres of 'em--seventy-five millions of a steal. Hm!'"
muttered Wayland. "Calls himself Moyese--Moses! Senator Smelter!
Senator Thief! Senator Beef Steer--"
She laughed. "I like your rage! Look! What's that mountain behind the
cabin doing?"
"Shine on pale moon, don't mind me," laughed Wayland; but suddenly
he stopped storming.
The slant sunlight struck the Holy Cross Mountain turning the snow
gullies pure gold against the luminous peak. Just for a moment the
white cornice of snow forming the bar of the apparent cross flushed to
the Alpine glow, flushed blood-red and quivering like a cross poised in
mid-air. An invisible hand of silence touched them both. The sunset
became a topaz gate curtained by clouds of fire and lilac mist; while
overhead across the indigo blue of the high rare mountain zenith slowly
spread and faded a light--ashes of roses on the sun altar of the dead day.
CHAPTER II
AN INTERLUDE THAT CAME UNANNOUNCED
Wayland stopped storming. His cynical laugh came back an echo hard
to his own hearing. Was It speaking the same mute language to her It
had spoken to him since first he came to the Holy Cross? The violet
shadows of twilight slowly filled with a primrose mist, with a rapt hush
as of the day's vespers. The great quiet of the mountain world wrapped
them round as in an invisible robe of worship.
Always, as the red flush ran the spectrum gamut of the yellows and
oranges and greens and blues and purples to the solitary star above the
opaline peak, he had wanted to wait and see--what? He did not know. It

had always seemed, if he watched, the primrose veil would lift and
release some phantom with noiseless tread on a ripple of night wind. In
his lonely vigils he used to listen for all the little bells of the nodding
purple heather to begin ringing some sort of pixie music, or for the
flaming tongues of the painter's flower to take voice in some chorus
that would beat time to the rhythm of woodland life fluting the age-old
melodies of Pan.
You would look and look at the winged flames of light swimming and
shimmering and melting outlines in the opal clouds there, till almost it
became a sort of Mount of Transfiguration, of free uncabined roofless
night-dreams camped beneath the sheen of a million stars.
You would listen and listen to the mountain silence--rare, hushed,
silver silence--till almost you could hear; but until to-night it had
always been like the fall of the snow flake. You could never be quite
sure you heard, though there was no mistaking a mass of several
million years of snow flakes when they thundered down in avalanche or
broke a ledge with the boom of artillery.
Now, at last--was it the end of a million years of pre-existence waiting
for this thing? Now, at last, Wayland realized that the quiet fellowship,
the common interests, the satisfaction of her presence, the aptitude their
minds had of always rushing to meet halfway on the same subject, had
somehow massed to a something within himself that set his blood
coursing with jubilant swiftness.
He looked at the rancher's daughter. What had happened? She was the
same, yet not the same. Her eyes were awaiting his. They did not flinch.
They were wells of light; a strange new light; depth of light. Had the
veil lifted at last? The welter of sullen anger subsided within him. The
wrapped mystery of the mountain twilight hushed speech. What folly it
all was--that far off clamor of greed in the Outer World, that wolfish
war of self-interest down in the Valley, that clack of the wordsters
darkening wisdom without knowledge! As if one man, as if one
generation of men, could stay the workings of the laws of eternal
righteousness by refusing to heed, any more than one man's will could
stop an avalanche by refusing to heed