The Freebooters of the Wilderness | Page 5

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 the law of the snowflake!
Calamity, the little withered half-breed woman, slipped in and out of the Forester's cabin tidying up bachelor confusion. The wind suffed through the evergreens in dream voices, pansy-soft to the touch. The slow-swaying evergreens rocked to a rhythm old as Eternity, Druid priests standing guard over the sacrament of love and night. From the purpling Valley came the sibilant hush of the River. Somewhere, from the branches below the Ridge, a water thrush gurgled a last joyous note that rippled liquid gold through