yappy--yappy--yappy; not do--not do any t'ing!  He send for Mount'
P'lice, mabee no do anyt'ing unless Indian man . . . he keel."  The
little hiss of breath again and a cunning mad look in the eyes.

"Go 'way Calamity!  Go home to our ranch house!"

By and by, came Wayland.  She knew why he had come after dark, carrying
the slender body against his shoulder.  A white handkerchief had been
thrown over the face; and she saw that he held the arms tightly to hide
the fact that both had been broken in the fall.  The rains had matted
the curly hair and brought a strange rose glow to the cheeks.  There
again--Eleanor had to shut the doors of memory; for they had carried
him in together.  The wind was not tempered to the shorn lamb; and it
is the living, not the dead, who beat against the Portals of Death.

They kept watch together, she and Wayland, in the Library across from
the closed door of the Mission.  Parlor, black-eyed Indian urchins
peeping furtively from the head of the stairs till bells rang lights
out.  Then silence fell, stabbed by the creak of floor, the swing of
door, the click and rustle of the cotton wood leaves outside.

There was a slight patter of rain-drip from the eaves somewhere.  A
gate swung to the wind; and, from across the hall, they could hear the
driven footsteps pacing up and down the parlor.  Then, the
drip,--drip,--was broken by longer blanks, and stopped.  The cotton
wood leaves ceased to rustle and flutter.  Only the twang of the night
hawk's wing hummed through the stillness; and the distracted tread no
longer paced the Mission Parlor.  When Eleanor came back from across
the hall, she shut the Library door softly.

"She is praying," she said.

Wayland had been extemporizing a morris chair into a lounge with his
Service coat for a pillow.  He threw a navajo rug across.  Then, he
faced her.  The look of masterdom had both hardened and softened.  She
did not know that the hunger-light of her own face hardened that
hardness; and she gazed through the darkened window to hide her tears.
He stood beside her with his arms folded.  A convulsive shudder shook
her frame.  Wayland tightened his folded arms.  Sympathy is so easy.
The sense of her nearness, of her trust, of the warm living fire of her
love was pushing him not over the precipice but into the battle, out
beyond the firing line.  What did one man matter in this big fight
anyway?  They heard the sibilant hush of the River flood-tide; and the
warm June dark enveloped them as in a caress.  They could see the sheet
lightning glimmer on the bank of cumulous clouds behind the Holy Cross.
The humming night-hawk, up in the indigo of mid-heaven, uttered a
lonely, far, fading call, as of life in flight; and a rustle of wind,
faint as the brushing of moth wings, passed whispering into silence.

"You don't really think death is the end of all, do you?" she asked.

Wayland could not answer.  If she had looked, she would have seen his
face white and his eyes shining with a strange new light.  He drew back
a little in the dark of the window casement, with his hand on the sill.
It touched hers and closed over it.  Then, somewhere from the dark came
a night-sound heard only in June, the broken dream-trill of a bird in
its sleep.  When she spoke, her voice was low, keyed as the dream-voice
from the dark.

"Where did the spray of flowers you gave me come from?"

"Sprig I'd stuck in my hat band."

"Was that all?  Didn't you mean to tell me more?"

"It's a pearl everlasting blossom," answered Wayland.

She waited.  He heard the slow ticking of his own watch.

"I was dreaming of your face," he blundered out, "and when I wakened,
the thing had blown down on--the hammock."  It was a clumsy subterfuge;
and he knew that her thought meeting his half-way divined his dream.

The wind passed whispering into silence.  He felt the quiver of the
pine needles outside, trembling to the touch of wind and night.  The
sense of her nearness, of her trust, of the warm living fire of her
love swept over him unstemmed; and, when she turned and looked in his
eyes, he caught her in his arms and held her there with a fierce
tenderness, her face thrown back, the veins of her throat pulsing to
the touch of wind and night, her lips parted, her lashes hiding her
eyes.

"Tell me that you are mine," he whispered.

She did not answer for a moment.  Then she lifted her eyes.  He drank
their light as a thirsty man might drink waters of life.  Neither
spoke.  The rustling wind passed whispering.  The June dark enveloped
them in the warm caress of the night.  By the dim flare of the library
lamp he saw her lips trembling.

"Tell me," he commanded.

"Do I need to tell you?"

"Yes, yes!  I must have a seal of memory for the dark future," and his
tongue poured forth such utterances as he had not dreamed men could use
but in prayer.  "I must know from your own lips."

He felt the tremor, felt the two hands rise to frame his face, felt the
catch and take of breath, heard the broken notes of gold.

"Then, take it," she said.

He bent over her lips in an exquisite torture that could neither give
nor take enough till she struggled to free herself, when he crushed her
the closer, and kissed the closed eyes and the forehead and the hair
and the pulsing throat.  Then he opened his arms.

She sank on the morris chair and hid her face in her hands.  They
neither of them spoke nor heard very much but the pounding of their own
hearts.  Wayland gazed out in the dark at the shiny flood-tides of the
river.  She had not meant--she had meant always to be free; she had not
meant to mingle her life currents in the destiny of others.

The door opened suddenly.  It was old Calamity, red-shawled and
stooping.

"Missa Vellam say not for vait no longer, Mademoiselle!  She aw' right.
She say t'ank you now for to go home!"

Eleanor rose with a shuddering sigh

"Come then, Calamity," she said.

Wayland walked with her to the ranch house, the old half-breed woman
pattering behind.  The gray dawn-light lay on the river mistily.  At
the gate, she turned.

"Has Mr. Matthews come back yet, Calamity?"

Calamity gave a vigorous shake of her head.

"I am going up to the Rim Rocks at once to see what's become of him.
Go on in, Calamity; I want to speak to Miss MacDonald!  Forgive me," he
pleaded.  "I had no right.  I have no right to anything till I have
cleaned up this damnable hell-work.  I must not leave duty till I have
fought this thing out; and I must not drag you in; but I wanted--" he
paused; "I couldn't help it."

She trembled, but she took refuge in neither the subterfuge nor the
pretence of the Eastern woman.

"It was yours," she said.

Wayland's eyes flashed their gratitude.  "It's so God-blessed
beautiful, Eleanor; it's so wonderfully beautiful I mustn't spoil it
with my man hands!  I couldn't believe it true without the memory
you've given me; but you must keep me in line!  Now that I have that
memory in my heart I'll drink it, and hike for the firing line!  My
place isn't here; you must never let me break my resolution again."

"I never will," interrupted Eleanor.

"We've got to fight this thing to the last ditch!  If the innocent may
be done to death by our law makers; if murder can be planned and
carried out unpunished; there's an end to our democracy!  Last year it
was a little school teacher strangled down in the Desert; nobody
punished, because that would have interfered with a voting gang on
election day.  This year, it's Fordie.  _If these crimes had been
committed under a monarchy, the people would have tanned the hide of
the king into boot leather_!  Last year it was the little school
teacher.  This year it's Fordie.  Tomorrow, it may be any man, woman or
child in the Valley.  If they'd keep their crimes among their own kind,
there would be some excuse for this let-alone policy; but when freedom
to do what a man likes means freedom to push crime into your life and
mine, freedom to deprive others of freedom, it's time the Nation jumped
on somebody!  We've got to fight this damnable thing to the last ditch,
Eleanor!"

"Good luck and God speed," she said without looking up; and she turned
without once looking back, and walked up the slab steps of the rustic
entrance to the ranch house.

CHAPTER IX

RIGHT INTO MIGHT

Don't wait for Mr. Matthews and me.  We are setting out on the Long
Trail.  It is the Long Trail this Nation will have to travel before
Democracy arrives.  It is the Trail of the Man behind the Thing; and
we'll not quit till we get him.  You remember what our old visitor said
about "splitting the air to get somewhere."  We are going to quit
"sawing the air" and "split it to get somewhere."  We are going to set
out after the Man; the little codger first, as a foot print on the Long
Trail to the lair of the Man Higher Up.

You cannot stab a lot of things to life as you did last night and the
night before, and then expect them to lie quiet and be the same.  You
have sent me forth on the Long Trail, Eleanor; and I shall hunt the
better because you have stabbed me alive and will never let me go to
sleep again.  I thank you; and yet, I can't thank you, mine _Alder
Liefest_--look up and see what that means in old Saxon--Yours in Life
and Death and Always and Out Beyond.

  Dick.

I have ordered a wreath from Smelter City for Fordie.  Find it hard to
stop writing and go from you; but the darned old Mountain doesn't look
the same; it's all draped out in such "dam-phool 'appiness" that I am
glad in the shadow of Death.

  Dick. (2nd)

Don't forget every day dawn and sunset, I come to renew the Seal.  Ever
study Algebra in college?  Then look up what this means.

  Dick. (nth)

And because she had graduated from girl to woman between sunset and
daydawn of that Death Watch, she kissed the last signature, right in
the midst of the German cook's dishes, set all higgeldy-piggeldy on the
oilcloth top instead of the linen cover, owing to the distraction of
the night's tragedy.  It was his first love letter; and because it was
his first, he did not know it was a love letter.  He had written it on
the pages of a field note book.  On the reverse side, were figures of
triangulations and scaled timbers, which Eleanor fingered lovingly
because the dumb signs seemed to connect her life with his
before--before what?  Ask those who know!

The note was lying at her breakfast place when she came out from a
sleepless night, a night that seemed to pass swinging between the gates
of Life and the gates of Death, with phantoms on the trail between, of
Love so terrible its glory blinded her, of Crime so dark its shadow
obscured her faith in God.  For hours, she had lain quivering to the
consciousness of that moment when Life leaped up to meet and blend with
Life in Love.  For hours, she had lain quivering to the consciousness
of Crime stalking satyr-faced amid the shadows of Life, Greed and
Murder and Lust, hiding beneath suave words, behind conventionality,
draped in all the broad phalacteries of law, ready to leap fanged at
the throat of Innocence in a Land of Let-Alone; and she emerged from
the conflict of these two forces no longer what would be called a
Christian, no longer a Quiescent, no longer a Let Alone.  She emerged
knowing that Democracy must become a joke, and Christianity the
laughing stock of the ages, unless Right could be made over into Might.

Then, she found the Ranger's note at her late breakfast--it was a
shockingly late breakfast, it was after the noon hour--the note saying
that he had set out on the Long Trail that the Nation must travel, the
trail of the Man behind the Thing, the Man Higher Up.  It was as it had
been from the first with him, the meeting half-way of their thoughts
from different beginnings; and she kissed the signature with a gesture
that played havoc with the breakfast dishes and sent Calamity
snivelling and muttering from the kitchen.  The ignorant half-breed's
knowledge of life among the miners of the Black Hills and the shingle
men of the Bitter Boot saw-mills didn't admit explanations of love that
kissed signatures and impelled tears.

And yet while revolution convulsed two souls you could have gone from
end to end of the Valley that week or to every cabin on the Homestead
Claim of the Ridge and not heard a living soul speak one word of the
tragedy on the Rim Rocks.  Were they moral cowards?  I don't think so.
Wasn't it more of that spirit of Let Alone?  If you had mentioned the
terrible episode to a casual settler, he would have given you a blank
look and remarked "that he hadn't heard."

The story set down here, I could not myself have learned if a chance
ramble over the foot hills of the Rim Rocks had not led one day to a
solitary little grave, surrounded by a picket fence marked by the
figure of a kneeling child carved in rough sand stone.  As the guest of
the Mission School, I made the mistake of asking the mother, herself,
whose grave that was.  Women, who are neither politicians nor politic,
have a plain way of uttering harsh facts.  She did not speak about the
author of her boy's death in soft words, that little white haired
mother.  She used a term oftener heard in the purlieus of criminal
courts.  "To think," she exclaimed bitterly, "to think that Fordie,
descended from generations of Williams who have pioneered and fought
for and built up this country since ever the first Williams landed in
Boston in 1666, was done to death by this murderer, this truckster,
this political trickster, this outcast from the European gutters, this
huckster of lazaretto morals and bawd houses, who is overturning our
Nation with his oiled villainies and peddler ways!  No, we have never
taken Government aid and we never shall!  I like to know that my Indian
girls are safe."  What more she added, I do not relate; for an angered
mother has a way of uttering terrible truths.

To-day, if you visit that grave on the crest of the saddle back, you
will find it flanked by two others, a man's on one side with the figure
of a trader carved in sandstone by the Indians; on the other, old
Calamity's with a plain granite slab; though I have heard strict people
say her body ought not to have been laid there because of the vagrant
character of her early life.

Indian boys from the school had shaped the coffin and carved the figure
for the stone.  A girlish teacher read the Church Services for the
dead; and the children's voices rose a thin tremulous treble in the
funeral hymn around the grave.  Wild flowers covered the casket, pearl
everlasting and the wind flower and the white Canada violet and the
painter's brush vari-colored as a flame; and a wreath had come up from
Smelter City.

Sights and sounds that have been a setting for sorrow, haunt the mind.
After that day, Eleanor could never hear the hammer of the woodpecker,
the lone cry of circling hawk, the whistling of the solitary mountain
marmot, without hearing also the thin treble of the Indian pupils
breaking and silencing on that funeral hymn till only the mother's
voice sang clarion to the end.  She heard the low melting trill of the
blue bird and the wrangling rasp of the jay--true and counterfeit,
peace and discord--had God put right and wrong in the world for the
friction of the conflict between, to develop souls?  Had one been set
over against the other, like light and shadow, to train the spiritual
eye to know?

Then, the Indian boys began to lower the casket.  One young pall bearer
faltered and slipped his hold; it was the little white haired mother's
hand steadied the rope that lowered, and slowly lowered, out of sight
for ever.  Then one of the girl teachers dropped in a great bunch of
mountain laurel.  Eleanor succeeded in leading the mother away.

Were the amethyst portals still ajar to the infinite life; or did the
shadow of the Cross, of the time-old ever-recurring crucifixion, darken
the vista of a glad future?  The Indian children filed in through the
gate of the Mission school.  At the gate, the mother looked up the
Saddle back.  She had no time for the pampered luxury of self conscious
grief.  She had directed the making of the coffin and the carving of
the sandstone and had led the funeral hymn to the end; but now she
looked back.  Ashes of roses across the sky, creeping phantom shadows,
and in her heart, the sombre presence of the after-desolation which
neither faith nor fortitude casts out.  She would go to sleep dull with
the woe of it and dream depressed of its loneliness, to waken heavy
with the memory.  Then, by and by, would come the peace that the dead
send, which is not forgetfulness.  But now she looked back, looked back
with the wrench that was the tearing of flesh and spirit asunder.
Above the new-made grave, across those topaz sunset gates, stood the
figure of the native woman, shawl thrown from her head reaving the long
black hair; and from the hill crest came such a long low cry as might
have been a ghost echo of all the age-old world sorrows.  Eleanor felt
the quick twitch on her arm.  Without a word, without a tear, the boy's
mother had fainted.

"We ought to have looked out for that," explained one of the girl
teachers from the school.  "We ought to have left Calamity home.  She
has always done that since they took her child away."

"Had she a child?" asked Eleanor.

"Yes; and they took it away when she went insane."

Eleanor slept with the leaves of the field-book under her pillow that
night; but she slept the heavy dreamless sleep of baffled hope.

CHAPTER X

THE HANDY MAN GETS BUSY

If you think the Senator had had anything to do with the terrible
events of the Rim Rocks, you are jumping to conclusions and must surely
have failed to follow the activities of Mr. Bat Brydges the morning
after the tragedy.

The first newspaper office that the handy man visited was owned by the
Senator.  That was easy.  Bat went into the reporters' long room where
the typewriters usually clicked.  This morning they were silent.  The
men were out on their assignments.  The news editor was taking a
message over the telephone.  Bat sat down on the table and waited.  The
news editor was thin-faced and nervous and alert and immaculately
groomed.  Bat was round-faced and sleepy-eyed--tortoise-shell eyes--and
all that prevented his suit from looking positively slovenly was that
his own ample avoirdupois filled every wrinkle.

The news editor adjusted his glasses to his nose and answered, "Yes,
Yes," impatiently over the telephone.

"It's a parson," he explained with an irritable snap of his black eyes
towards Bat.

Bat smiled sleepily.  "Thinks you're hungering and thirsting for news
of his flock, does he?"

"No, blank it," snapped the news editor.

"It's another kind of flock that's worrying us this morning."

Bat's smile faded to a sly haze in his sleepy eyes.

"What has the old boy got to say?"

"How do you know he is old?" snapped the news editor.

Bat didn't volunteer on that point.

"Ask him what his name is," suggested Brydges.

"What did you say the name was?  Matthews--Matthews--is that it?  Wait,
please!"  The news-editor put his hand over the mouth piece of the
telephone.

"Know anything about him, Bat?"

"I should say I do!  Choke it off!  He's staying with Missionary
Williams at the Indian School, and you know about how much love is lost
between Williams and Moyese."

"But we can't possibly suppress this, Bat.  It will be all over the
country."

"Better see whose ox is gored," advised Brydges.

"But we've got to get this, Brydges!  The stage driver's told one of my
men, already!  Every bar-room buffer in the country side will know it
by night."

"Then you had better get it straight," advised Bat.

The news-man looked in space through eyes narrowed to an arrow.  Bat
watched sleepily.  "If we choke this old chap's account off, can you
give one to us?"

"Got it in my pocket!  I've just come in on the stage!"

"I thought you came down in a motor with the Senator?  Didn't he take
the morning limited for Washington?"

"Well, the darn thing broke down so often it was bad as the stage.
Anyway, I've got the story for you--"

"Senator O. K. it?"  The news-man hung the telephone receiver up, still
keeping his hand over the mouth piece.

"Lord, no!"  Bat slid off the table, tore the sheets from his note book
and handed the story of the Rim Rocks across to the editor.

"What do you take the Senator for?  He knows nothing about it; but it's
in his constituency, and I guess his own paper should see that the
account which goes in is straight."

The news-editor hoisted his foot to the seat of a chair and stood
racing his eyes through sheet after sheet of Brydges's copy.  Bat
lighted a cigar, put his hands in his pockets and pivoted on his heels.
There was the squeak, squeak, squeak of a child's new boots coming up
the first flight of stairs; and a squeak, squeak, squeak up the second
flight of stairs; and a little girl, not twelve years old, resplendent
in such tawdry finery as might have stepped out of an East End London
pawn shop, presented herself framed in the doorway of the reporter's
room.  She plainly belonged to the immigrant section of Smelter City.
The news-editor never took his eyes from Bat's copy.  They were eyes
made for drilling holes into the motives behind facts.  Bat emitted a
whistle that was a laugh.

"Hullo," he said.  "I knew they were coming on younger every year; but
I didn't know we had gone into the kindergarten business yet.  You
don't want a job?  Now don't tell me you want a job?"

The little person lifted a pair of very sober eyes beneath the brim of
some faded plush headgear.

"Is thus th' rha-porther's room?"

"Sure! you bet!"  Bat wheeled on both heels.  The little person looked
at him very steadily and solemnly.

"A' wannt," she said in that mongrel dialect of German-American and
Cockney-English, "A wawnt an iteem."

"Sure," says Bat, "nothing easier."

"Wull thur be eny chaarge?"

"Not for ladies," says Bat, saluting, hand to hat, and grinning more
sleepily than ever.

"Then, A wull guve it t' y': wull y' write it, sor?"

"Sure!"  Bat squared himself to one of the reporters' high desks.

"Mestriss Leez-y O'Fannigan," dictated the little publicity agent.

"Miss O'Funny Girl," with a look to his fat cheeks as of a bag blown
full of air.

"No Sor, O'Fan-ni-gan-"

"Perhaps," said Bat, "You'd like to know we're in the same boat, except
that you're seeking exactly what I'm trying to avoid, Miss O'Finnigan?"

"Wull dance t' night--" continued the little publicity seeker.

"Will she dance in her copper-toe boots?" asks Bat.

"Wull dance at the H---- i-o-f lodge meetin' at--"

"That'll do, get her out of this," ordered the news-man.  "It grows
worse every day.  Every damphool thinks the world is aching for an
interview with himself, from the mining fakirs to the Shanty Town
brats: it's seeped down to the kids.  You go home, kid, and tell your
mother to spank you special extra--"

They heard the fat little legs stumping down the stairs.  "That kid
belongs to Shanty Town.  She dances for the bar room buffers now;
she'll dance later, like you and me, Bat, for bigger bluffers.  Freedom
of the press!  Damn it, I'm sick of the bunco game, Bat--"

"Draw it easy," drawled Bat.  "If you're sick of it, it's dead easy to
get out.  I guess the kid is doing the same thing as you and me: 'Give
us this day our daily bread.'  How's the story?  Will you give it a
flare head?"

"Will there be any charge?" ironically repeated the news-man.

"Not for Moyese," smiled the handy man sleepily, "and say, if I were
you, I'd do one of two things, get rid of my conscience or get a tonic
for my nerves."

The telephone rang.  The news-man ran to the receiver and a moment
later slammed it back on the hook.

"Old frump, giving namby pamby talks on woman's influence in politics
without votes."  The news editor spat aimlessly.

Bat tapped the story of the Rim Rocks with his pencil.  "Well," he
asked.

"We'll give this flare."

The news man put heavy underscores in blue beneath the words TEN
THOUSAND DOLLARS REWARD, BY THE VALLEY CATTLE ASSOCIATION FOR PROOF OF
THE PERPETRATORS OF LAST NIGHT'S VILE CRIME.

"We'll put this in red!  God!  The Senator is an artist!  I like having
to lick the hand that leashes me."

"And feeds you, eh?" added Bat.

Beneath the flare heading followed a statement of facts (more or less)
to the effect that in an altercation between the drovers of some
outside cattlemen and the herders belonging to the MacDonald ranch, the
sheep herd had been hustled--("I like your alliterations, Bat, it gives
flavor of quality," commented the news-man with a snap of his black
eyes,) too close to the edge of the Rim Rocks with the unintended and
tragical result that several hundred sheep had been shoved over the
battlements.  ("What I like specially is what you don't give,"
commented the news-man.)

There was not a word about broken backs and slashed lambs and
disemboweled ewes; nor of what had been found on the Upper Mesas.  As a
sort of addendum it was stated that a boy belonging to the Mission
school had lost his life in the melee.

"Anyway, we're in style!  Way to tell a thing now adays is to turn all
around it, and not tell anything at all.  Auto suggestion, eh, Bat?"

Bat's fat cheeks blew up in the explosion of a bursting paper bag.
"You bet it's auto all right.  If you'd heard the old man talking all
the way down on the iniquity of the thing: he kept it going harder than
the buzz wagon."

"Better inform a breathlessly eager public that he's gone to
Washington?"

"Here, I've got that, too!  He dictated that straight, 'for the express
purpose of taking up the whole question of eliminating the grazing
areas from the National Forests when it will be possible for the State
authorities to protect the live stock interests,'" Bat handed across
the second item.

"What in thunder have the National Forests to do with the Rim Rock
massacre?"  The newsman looked up through his glasses.

"And who in thunder is going to ask that?"

Bat tapped the last item sharply with his pencil.  "They'll read _that_
and they'll read the other, and I'll bet dollars to doughnuts nine men
out of ten will begin jawing and spouting and arguing that if there
were _no_ National Forests, there would be no Range Wars.  If they draw
a false impression, that's the public's look out.  If we weren't
dealing with damphools, we couldn't fool 'em."

"But it didn't happen on the National Forests."

"But it's only the tenth man who will stop to think that out.  You put
in one of those big middle page cartoons--National Forests with the
Federal sign board, KEEP OFF, the sheep being massacred inside the sign
board and the State sheriff unable to go in and stop it--"

"But you didn't say massacred!  You said they accidently went over the
edge."

"But it's only the tenth man will stop to think that.  You run the
cartoon, see?" said Bat, and, though he asked it as a question, if
sounded final.  The news-man went tearing back to the front editorial
rooms.  Bat went whistling down stairs, two steps at a bounce.  At the
half-way landing, he paused.

"Say," he yelled up, "you can use the same old cartoon; 'Keep Off the
Grass,' you know."

"Eh?--right," crossly from the front room.

"And say?"

The news-man came out and leaned over the upper railing.

"Don't forget to take that tonic for your nerves."

The news-man told Bat to go any where he pleased; but it was all in the
day's work with Mr. Bat Brydges.  He didn't go.  The handy man went
straight across to the paper in opposition.  The news-man went back to
the front room and stood thinking.  He didn't curse Bat nor emit fumes
of the sulphurous place to which he had invited Brydges.  He was
contemplating what he called his "kids"; and he was figuring the next
payment due on the Smelter City lots in which he had been speculating.
Evidently, these were the news-man's tonic; for he at once did what he
described as "bucking it" and called down the speaking tube for the
press man to put on the old cartoon.

The opposition paper required more finesse on the part of the handy
man.  Bat strolled as if it were a matter of habit into the telegraph
editor's room, where he lolled back in one of the two empty chairs.  It
was still early and the wires were silent.  Bat laid one cigar at the
editor's place and took a fresh one for himself.

"Hullo, Bat," bubbled the telegraph man, dashing from the composing
room in his shirt sleeves, "We've just been having a yell of an
argument about the elements of success."  He seated himself and whipped
out a match to light the cigar.  Bat was clicking his cigar case open
and shut.  This editor was all nerves too.  Nerves seemed to go with
the job; but these nerves were not jangled.  He leaned back in his
swing chair with one boot against the desk.  "What makes a man
successful, anyway?  It isn't ability.  Your news-man across the way
could buy our office out with brains; but gee whitaker, he's worse than
a dose of bitters!  Now take your Senator, he hasn't either the
education or the brains of lots of our cub reporters, here!"  He paused
nibbling his cigar end.  "Yet, he's successful.  We aren't, except in a
sort of doggon-hack-horse way.  You're next to the old man, Bat, what
do you say makes him successful?"

Bat clicked the cigar case shut and put it in his pocket.

"Two things: he's a specialist; he delivers the goods no other man can
deliver; and he doesn't fool any time away by bucking into a buzz saw,
fighting windmills and that sort of thing, way you fellows 'agin the
Government' do."

The telegraph man removed his cigar.

"What do you mean by 'delivers the goods no other man can deliver'?  Do
you mean the pork barrel?"

"No," said Bat, "I don't, though the pork barrel is a d--ee--d
essential part of the game.  Here's what I mean; when you came to this
Valley, there was nothing doing.  We had mines; but we hadn't a
smelter!  Well, Senator got the coking coal for a smelting site and the
big developers came in.  Other men couldn't, wouldn't or didn't dare to
do it!  He did it.  He delivered the goods and got the big fellows
interested."

"He stole 'em, those coal lands.  He jugged 'em thro' Land Office
records with false entries."  The telegraph man had lowered his voice.

"We don't call 'em stolen when it's been the making of the Valley."

"No, because the Smelter is a sacred cow mustn't be touched for the
sake of the grease."

"Then, there was nothing doing in lumber; big fellows wouldn't come in
and develop.  Well, Moyese got 'em the timber tracts for a song.  Other
men couldn't, wouldn't or didn't dare.  He delivered the goods--"

"The courage of the highwayman," commented the wire editor with a puff.

"We don't call it that when it helps the Valley," corrected the handy
man.

"No, it's another sacred bovine; mustn't be touched for fear of the
axle grease.  See?  I've got a list of 'em--public lands, through
freights, water power, smelter, lumber deals," the telegraph man opened
his table drawer and held out a scrawled list.  "If you call that
delivering the goods, I call it filling the barrel.  What's the other
factor for success?"

"Not bucking into a buzz saw.  The world is mostly made of barkers and
builders.  You fellows spend all the time barking.  Then you wonder
there's nothing to show in the way of a building."

The telegraph wires began to click and the girl operator came in with
some tissue sheets.

"Fight in Frisco--that goes," commented the telegraph editor dashing in
the "ands" and "buts" and the punctuation.  He stuck the slip on the
printer's hook.  "Wedding in Newport--"

"That goes," laughed the handy man, "There's no sacred cow about that."

The telegraph man wrote headings for the dispatches and stuck them on
the hook for the printer's boy.

"Speaking of sacred cows, it isn't exactly cows, but it's in the stock
line all right--what do you know about that business last night up on
Rim Rocks?  Stage driver has been blazing it all round town--"

"Stage driver's a liar," emphatically declared Brydges.

"Been trying to get the news for an hour; the wires are cut.  Can't get
'em by phone.  Think I'll send a man up to-night with a photographer."

"Oh, I wouldn't," drawled Bat sleepily.  "It isn't worth it.  I've just
come down.  Whole row's over.  You can't get a dub in the Valley to
open his mouth.  Same old gag we've used for the last ten years,
'heavily armed band of masked men,' 'scene like a butcher's shambles,'
and that guy of a sheriff 'scouring the hills for the miscreants.'
I'll bet he's under his bed scared blue."

"Who did it?"

"Same old gang of outside grazers, drovers who skipped the State line.
I succeeded in getting their names after a good deal of trouble."

"You did, did you?  Then give us a stick about it, will you?  Date it
special at the Rim Rocks!  Trouble is, if I do send a man up, business
office will kick at the expense account; for there's nothing in it; and
that kind of news hurts the Valley."

So Mr. Bat Brydges wrote forty lines of two paragraphs in which he
warned the public that this sort of thing had to stop; the West would
not stand for interference from outside cattlemen who were trying to
wrest the range away from local grazers.  There followed the names of
six men concerned in the Rim Rock fray.  Whose names they were, neither
Bat nor anyone else knew.  Also Mr. Sheriff Flood was not described as
"a guy" nor pictured as reposing under his bed.  He might have been a
walking arsenal of defence for the Valley.  According to Mr. Bat
Brydges, Sheriff Flood was busy on the case and had wired the
authorities of the adjoining States to be on the look out for the
guilty parties.  There followed a description of the guilty parties
photographed accurately from Mr. Bat Brydges's retina.

The third newspaper office was the least easy for the handy man's
tactics.  The editor was an independent of the fiery order.  Bat
avoided the editor and tackled a young reporter at the noon hour.

"What do you say to a spin in the 40 h. p. to-night?" he asked.

"What's on?"

The youth was reading an ink-smudged galley proof.

Bat sat down on the desk where he could read over the other's shoulder.
The proof reeked of "gore" and "shambles" and "heavily armed masked
men" and rifle shots thick as hail stones with a sheriff careening over
the Mesas at break neck speed slathered with zeal for law.

"What reforms are you jollying along now?" asked Bat.

"We'll jolly you fellows when this comes out."

"I've always said if I were his Satanic Majesty and wished to defeat
the goody-goodies, I wouldn't bother fighting 'em!  I'd take an
afternoon nap and let them buck themselves by their lies and
bickerings."

The youth ran his eye down the galley proof.

"Who filled you up with this dope?" Brydges lowered his voice to an
altogether amused and very confidential key.

"What's the matter with it?"

"Matter?  There's nothing right about it."

"Goes all the same.  Got snap!  It's good stuff."

"Stuffing, you mean," corrected the handy man.  "Say, where ever did
you get it?  Talk of stuff?  Somebody has mistaken you for a spring
chicken."

"Got it straight.  It's all right!  Fellow from the English colony--"

"English Colony?  Those Rookeries--Mother Carey's chickens.  Do you
know what that Rookery gang is?  A lot of gambling toughs, remittance
doughheads--"

"That doesn't spoil a ripping good story!  I'm going to wire a column
to Chicago."

"No, you're not," contradicted Brydges.  "That kind of thing hurts the
State more than ten thousand dollars will advertise it.  You go over
your advertising columns my boy--"

"All right!  It's up to you?"

Bat whistled and swung the galley proofs between his knees.

"Doesn't matter what you say out here.  Everybody knows your rag sheet
will contradict to-morrow what you say to-day in headings red and long
as a lead pencil.  You'll contradict in a little hidden paragraph
tucked away among the ads., and I guess we know which are the ads. out
here; but, if you want any more dope on inside stuff, don't you send
that East!  You have applied for a job on our paper twice.  If you want
one, don't you send that East!  What do they pay you, anyway?"

The youth paused to estimate; and youth's hopes are ever high.

"That's worth a hundred to me!"

"No, you don't!  They pay you six and ten and sometimes two, but it's
worth a hundred if you keep it out, nice crisp little bills, my boy.
Call for you to-night at five; but don't you play that story up."

It was then and there Bat showed himself a past master.  He sauntered
out of the office humming.

"Say, Brydges," called the youth, "what's wrong with this account,
anyway?"

"All wrong," reiterated Brydges stepping back.  "Wasn't a man lost his
life.  Wasn't a man on the Range at the time, only a kid got in the way
of a stampede!  Here, I'll give it to you straight!  I've just come
down from the Valley!  You tell what happened down in Mesa and Garfield
counties ten years ago, and up in Wyoming last spring!  Give it to the
other States.  Don't give your own State a black eye!  Come on out and
have something with me, and I'll fix you up as we feed."

So when the Independent's fiery columns came out with red scare heads
and gory recital full of reference to "something rotten in the State of
Denmark" and "damnable rascality," there was only one emasculated
innocuous column given to the local event, but seven columns were
steeped with the bloody details of sheep massacres and stock raids and
Range Wars in other states in "the good old gun-toting days."

Bat's last act that day was to send a telegram care of the East-bound
Limited to Senator Moyese.  It read, "All local papers out highly
gratulatory references your efforts to punish guilty parties."

CHAPTER XI

SETTING OUT ON THE LONG TRAIL

In the half light of mist and dawn, the Ranger ascended the Ridge trail.

Life was at flood-tide.  Thought focussed to one point of consciousness
set on fire of its own rays.  He walked as one unseeing, unhearing,
hardened to singleness of purpose, heedless of the steepness of the
climb, of his blood leaping like a mountain cataract, of his muscles
moving with the ease of piston rods; heedless of all but the warmth of
the glow enveloping his outer body from the flame burning within.

He did not follow the zig-zag Ridge trail but clambered straight up the
face of the slope, following pretty much the short cut-off they had
taken the night before.  He came to the crag where the spruce logs
spanned the tinkling water course.  There was a gossamer scarf of cloud
hanging among the mosses of the trees.  The peak came out opal fire
above belts of clouds.  The sage-green moss spanning the spruces turned
to a jewel-dropped thing in a sun-bathed rain-washed world of flawless
clouds and jubilant waters.  He drew a deep breath.  The air was tonic
of imprisoned sunlight and resinous healing.  Was each day's birth the
dawn to new being?

It was here he had met her the night before.  Waves of consciousness,
tender delirious consciousness, flooded and surprised him.  He had
asked for a seal of memory.  He knew now it would never be a memory: it
would be consciousness, ever-living, ever present; a compulsion not to
be controlled because it was not his own; and never to be quenched
because it burned within.  If he had been a weakling, the seal would
have been a seal to self; but because an elemental war for right was
winnowing the self out of him, he knew it was a seal to service.

Day-dawn marked the creation of a new world; and That had opened the
doors for him to a life that no telling could have revealed.  Would it
be the same with the Nation?  Would this struggle open the doors to a
new life; or would the powers that stood for law and right go on
marking time inside the firing line, while the powers that stood for
wrong and outrage held their course rampant, unchecked; straining the
law not to protect right but to extend wrong; perverting the courts;
stealing where they chose to steal; killing where they chose to kill;
deluging the land with anarchy by sweeping away law, just as surely as
the removal of the sluice gates would set loose flood waters?

He ascended the rest of the dripping Ridge trail in a swing that was
almost a run.

Below the Ranger cabin on the Homestead Slope stood the large oblong
canvas bunk house of the road gang employed by the Forest Service.

"Hi--fellows," shouted Wayland, shaking the tent flap.  "All hands up!"
And he ordered the foreman to send the road gang to skin and burn and
bury what lay at the foot of the battlements.  As the Rim Rocks lay a
few feet outside the bounds of the National Forests, it will be seen
that Wayland _had stopped marking time behind the law and gone out
beyond the firing line_.  If it isn't clear to you how the Ranger was
exceeding the authority of the law, then read the Senator's speeches
about "the Forest and Land Service men going outside their jurisdiction
employing Government men to do work which was not Government Service at
all."

The Ranger saddled his own broncho for himself and a horse belonging to
one of his assistants for the old frontiersman, who must be some where
on the upper Mesas.  To each saddle he fastened a Service hatchet and a
cased rifle.  Then, he caught one of the mules of the road gang for the
pack saddle.  Going inside the cabin, he furbished together such
provisions as his biscuit box shelves afforded, a sack containing half
a ham, a quarter bag of flour, one tin of canned beans, a tobacco pouch
filled with tea, another pouch with sugar on one side of the dividing
leather and salt in the other.  Then, he cinched a couple of cow-boy
slickers over the pack saddle, and, in place of the green Service coat
which he had left at the Mission, donned a leather jacket, took a last
look to see if a water-proof match case were in the inside pocket, ran
back to the cabin for a half-flask of brandy, and an extra hat, and
with the other horse and the pack mule in front, he mounted his pony
and set out for the Rim Rocks.  It will be seen this was not the
equipment of a man who intended to remain marking time.

Just for a second, he pondered which path to follow.  It would take an
hour to go down the Ridge trail, cross the Valley and ascend the
terra-cotta road of the Rim Rocks.  Couldn't he jump his horses over
the gully that cut between the Holy Cross and the Upper Mesa?  He
headed his horse into the tangle of hemlock and larch, the mule
trotting ahead snatching bites of dogwood and willow from the edge of
the dripping trail, the Ranger riding as Westerners ride, glued to the
leather, guiding by the loose neck rein instead of the bit, with a wave
of his hand to keep the little mule in line.

A turn to the left through a thicket of devil's club brought him where
the Ridge overlooked the River.  Wayland reined up sharply.  A pile of
logs scaled and marked with the U. S. stamp lay where the slightest
topple would send them over a natural chute into the River.  He had not
scaled those logs: neither had his assistants.  There was no record of
them on the books.  Of course, he had heard the chop and slash at the
settlers' cabins, but homesteaders don't farm on the edge of a vertical
precipice unless they are a lumber company; and logs tossed over that
precipice to the River were destined for only one market, Smelter City.
Then he remembered giving a permit to a Swede settler of the Homestead
Slope to take out windfall and dead tops for a little portable gasoline
engine; but the permit didn't cover this area.

"Having stopped stealing half a million from the Bitter Boot, they've
started their dummies in here."  He looked at the gashed timber-slash
as a thrifty man looks at wantonness and waste; it was a gaping wound
in the forest side, old and young trees alike hacked down, the stumps
of the big trees, not eighteen inches low as the regulations provided,
but three and four and five feet high of waste to rot and gather
fungus, the biggest of the giant spruce cut from a scaffolding nine
feet from the ground, leaving wasted lumber enough to build a house.

"This was done when I was away on my last long patrol," reflected
Wayland.  The slash of brushwood and wasted tops lay higher than his
horse's head.  "A fine fire-trap for the fall drought," thought Wayland
angrily.  "One spark in that tinder pile in a high wind; and there
would be no forests left on Holy Cross."

What did it mean, this open defiance, not of himself, (he was a mere
cog in the big wheel; so was the entire Forest Service,) this open
defiance of law; this open theft of Government property?  Connected
with the outrage of the Range War, and the Senator's advice for him to
stop suing for restitution of the two-thousand acres of coal lands, and
the handy-man's urgent arguments for him "to chuck the fight and come
down to the Valley," the Ranger knew well enough what the pile of
stolen logs stamped with a counterfeit Government hatchet meant;
stamped, of course, by some poor ignorant dummy foreigner.  The Ring
were setting their hired tools on to the fight.  And far away in the
East--yes it was the East's business to see what went on in the
West--were myriads of wage-earners forced to pay exorbitantly for coal
and wood and lumber and house rent because of this wanton waste; this
seizing fraudulently by the few of the property belonging to the many.
If they had thrown down the challenge, assuredly he was taking it up!
What would the people do about it, he wondered, when they came to know?
Would any power on earth waken the people up to do something, and stop
talking?  _A Roman ruler had fiddled while his imperial city burned.
What was the many-headed ruler of the great republic doing, while
enemies burned and cut and slashed and wasted in wantonness the
property of the public for the enrichment of the Ring_?

The Ranger touched his horse to a gallop and jumped all three animals
through the criss-cross of wind-fall and slash, coming out on the edge
of the rock chasm that cut the Upper Mesas off from the Holy Cross.
The gully crumbled on the near side and shelved on the far, twenty feet
deep and fifty wide, altogether not very jumpable, the Ranger thought.
He zig-zagged in and out among the larches along the margin of the rock
cut-way, noting "dead tops" ripe for the axe, pines where the squirrels
had cached cone seed at the root, spruce logs gone to punk with alien
seedlings coming up from the dead trunk, yellow ant-eaten wood-rot
ripped open by some bear hunting the white eggs; noting, above all, the
wonderful flame of the painter's brush, spikes with the tints of the
rainbow, like Indian arrows dipped in blood, knee-deep, multi-colored,
fiery, dyed in the very essence of sunglow, humming with bees and alive
with butterflies, lives of a summer in the aeon of ages that the snow
flakes had taken manufacturing soil out of granite, silt out of snow.

"The little snow flake gets there all right," reflected Wayland.  "It
takes time; but she carves out her little snow flake job all the same,
and the rocks go down before her!  Guess if we follow the law, we're
hitched up with the stars all right."

He reined up and caught at a pine bough.  A sight to hold the eye of
any forester held his; the enormous trunk of a fallen giant, a dozen
dwarfs growing from its punk, spanned the gully.  Wayland slid off his
horse.  The great trunk lay destitute of lesser branches to the tip on
the far side of the chasm like great characters that discard mannerisms.

The Ranger struck his Service axe into the trunk.  The bark held firm,
though he heard the ring of the dry-rot at the heart that had brought
the old giant crashing down to become food for the scrubs and pigmies
of the forest.  Wayland picked out two spindly birches.  Quick strokes
brought them down.  Walking out on the dead trunk, he threw a birch on
each side as a guard rail, affording fence, not protection, to the
wavering faith of a shy horse, "all a feeling of security to steady a
giddy head," he reflected.  He led the little pack mule; and the
bronchos followed.  A moment later, he was galloping through the
larches and low juniper that fringed the Mesas above the Rim Rock
trail, the mule huff-huffing to the fore snatching mouthfuls on the
run.  Then, with a lope, Wayland's broncho leaped out on the bare
sage-grown Mesas, the mule with ears pointed, nose high, heading
straight for the white canvas-top of a tented wagon.

For a moment, the light blinded Wayland's sight; for the sun had come
up in an orange fan; and the sky was not blue: it shone the dazzling
silver of mercury.  Against the high rarefied air came in view the
figure of a man, grotesquely exaggerated, head and shoulders first,
then body, riding a heavy horse, saddleless, hatless, coatless, white
of hair, heels pressed to his horse's flanks, bent far over the
animal's neck as Indians ride, galloping for the Rim Rock trail, or a
second jump from the battlements.

Wayland stood up in his stirrups and with hands trumpeted uttered a
yell.  The rider jerked his horse to a rear flounder, waved
frantically, then split the air--

"Glory be to the powers--but--A'm glad to see you!  A've headed them
off from the South trail.  We've got them, Wayland, the low dastard
scoundrels!  We've got them trapped like rats in a trap!  They're in
the Pass if you've a man in the Valley with spirit enough to get out
with a gun!"  He stopped for breath as the two horses floundered
together.

"We haven't," answered Wayland.

"They jumped the gully!  Man alive, y' ought t' seen them jump the
gully!  A slammed them right down into the bottom of it.  A would to
God 't had been to the bottomless pit.  The same gentry A saw that
night under your Ridge, saving his High Mightiness.  The evil fellow
wi' the sheep hide leggings, an' the one armed blackguard in the
cow-boy slicker, an' the corduroy dandy wi' the red tie, an' four more
of them same card-sharp gentry.  A rode 'long the top of y'r gully an'
poured six bullets after 'em!  Man alive!  A heard the fellow in the
yellow slicker yell bloody murder when A fired!  A'm hopin'--God
forgive me--A've nipped him in the other arm an' brought him winged t'
th' throne o' Grace!  They followed the gully bed behind y'r Mountain,
the white horse same as yon night under y'r Ridge, limpin', the one
armed man rockin' in the saddle an' spittin' out blasphemous filth for
th' others to wait.  A've kept guard all night, yellin' an' howlin'
like a vigilantee, knowin' they're not the gentry to run into the arms
of them good old-time neck-tie com'tees; an' not dreamin' A hadn't
another cartridge to my name!"  The old man swabbed the sweat from his
brow.

"A left m' coat and togs back at yon chuck wagon!"  Wayland noticed he
was riding stocking soled.

"I have an extra hat for you here."  Wayland tossed the soft felt from
the pocket of his leather coat.

"Oh, A saw 'em plain enough; same ill-lookin' six that y'r hell-kite
laws hatch on a bad frontier!  Make no mistake.  Yon white vest is at
the bottom o' this deviltry!  Who is he, Wayland?"

Wayland related the visit of a white-vest to his Ridge cabin; and they
trotted forward towards a sheep wagon.

"How did y' come up here?" asked the old frontiersman.

"Where did you get that horse?" retorted the Ranger.

"One of the chuck wagons' teams--"

"Herders all right?" asked Wayland.  He knew what the answer must be;
the same answer that had been disgracing the West these twenty years.

The old man jerked his horse to a dead stop, drew himself erect and
looked straight at the Ranger.

"Wayland, man, is this Russia--or Hell?  Is there another country in
the world calls itself civilized would allow four herder men to be
burned to death?  Does the country know what is doing?  Do you know
what happened?  Do you know that last wagon is left there only because
the rains put out the fire?  Y'll find the iron tires of the other
wagons with skeletons of men chained to the wheels.  A came up just as
they were settin' aboot firin' the second wagon.  They'd ripped all the
flour bags open and loosed the horses.  This one, A caught full pelther
down the trail."

The old man shook his head.

They trotted their horses across the Mesas in silence towards the
glaring white canvas wagon.  Broken harness, half-burned spokes, the
charred hub of a wheel, snapped whiffle-trees, the white dust of
scattered flour littered the ground.  A brown scorch of flame up the
back of the tent above the remaining wagon marked where the rains had
extinguished the fire.  A smouldering ill-smelling ash heap told the
fate of the other wagons.

"Hell-devilish work, hell-devilish work!  Th' beasts of the field
couldna' conceive such baseness, Wayland!  'Tis the work o' devils
spawned by harpies!  They say there is no devil to-day!  Hoh!"  The old
man puffed the heresy from his pursed lips.  "The beasts don't prey on
their own 'cepting the rats that starve; but, man, there's no
explanation of his self-destruction 'cepting the old fashioned one,
Wayland.  'He was possessed by a devil.'"

The Ranger had dismounted and was prodding the ash-heap with his heavy
boot sole.  Then, he gave the embers a smart flap with his whip.  The
blackened hub of a wheel went circling out.  Suddenly, Wayland turned
away his face, white and nauseated, hardened to resolution granite as
the rocks.  Eyeless sockets of a skeleton face protruded from the
ashes; and on the ground were stains which the rains had not washed
out.  It was then Wayland noticed the bloody thumb marks round the
canvas front of the wagon seat where the driver had been dragged down.

For a little time neither man spoke.  But, was it not the natural
ending of brutality unleashed of law; of crime left alone by the good?

"To mutilate thousands of sheep was damnable enough," said Wayland;
"but--this?"

The old frontiersman had picked up coat and boots flung aside the night
before.  He stood holding by his horse's mane looking down.  "And this
is a white man's land," he said.  "To this have y' prostituted freedom
bought by th' blood of saints an' martyrs?  Not in th' heat o' passion,
but for filthy gain, has a free people come to this?  _The heads o'
kings fell on the bloody block for less crime in days not so soft
spoken as these_.  Is y'r freedom, freedom to right or to wrong?  Is it
to send y'r Nation smash over the precipice?  Wayland, _is this
Democracy_?"

The Ranger did not answer for a moment.

"No," he said quietly, "it isn't Democracy any more than your Robber
Barons were Monarchy!  Don't you make that mistake; this is Anarchy,
the Anarchy of unrestrained greed!  You fought it in your plundering
Scotch Robber Barons long ago!  We have to fight it to-day in our
plundering plutocrats!"

CHAPTER XII

THE MAJESTY OF THE LAW VEILS ITSELF

"Do you mean me to believe," the old frontiersman drew himself up to
the full height of British superiority to everything outside the island
of its own circumscribed knowledge, "do you mean me to believe that if
any of these poor herders had escaped as witnesses, we'd not have been
able to send these blackguard murderers to the gallows?"

The Ranger had signalled for some of the road gang to ascend from below
the battlements to keep guard till the coroner could come.  The little
pack mule to the fore, Wayland and Matthews were picking the way slowly
down the terra cotta trail of the Rim Rocks.

"It does not make the slightest difference in the world what you or I
believe, Sir!  The facts are unless you could offer a witness money
enough to take him out the United States and to keep him for the rest
of his life, he would develop a good-forgetter, or else the same old
gag--'been blind folded,' 'didn't see,' and so on, and on, and on; you
can't blame them!  I'll bet if every one of the herders had escaped
instead of festering there in the ash heap, they'd all be legging it
out of the country far and fast as they could go."

The little mule came to a stand at a bend in the switch back; and the
old evangelist sat ruminating silently on his broncho.

"Y' have a sheriff?"

Wayland laughed.

"He's like the Indian flies; a no-see-him.  He'll ride over the hills
for weeks and if he tumbles over the top of his prisoner, he can't find
his man!"

The old Britisher looked doubtfully at Wayland, as much as to say, "I
don't believe you."

"You're no temptin' me to take the law into our own hands?"

Again Wayland laughed.

"My dear sir, you don't understand!  I don't want to drag you into this
at all!  For ten years, _the powers that stand for law in this country
have been marking time behind the firing line; while the other fellow
got away with the goods_.  They have been marking time while Crime
scored, and what you call the Devil kept tally."

The old man nodded his head approvingly.

"That's all true!"

"You ask me if I intend to break the law?  No, Sir, I do not; but _I do
intend to carry the law out beyond the firing line.  The thief strains
the law to get away with the goods; I am going to strain the law to get
them back.  The murderer strains the law to protect his damned useless
neck; I'm going to strain the law to break his neck_.  Unless," he
added, "I break my own neck doing it."

The old man had drawn down his brows.  "A don't just like the sound of
it; what's your plan?"

"To go out with a gun till I get them; the way your own Mounted Police
do up in Canada!  _I'm going to quit monkeying with technicalities in
the twilight zone . . . and go out . . . after the man_."

The old Britisher sat thinking: "Wayland, if A was managing this thing,
first thing A'd do would be blow such a blast on your local press, the
authorities would _have_ to sit up, then--A'd go after your sheriff if
A had to tackle the coward by the scruff of his scurvy neck, A'd make
him ashamed . . . _not_ . . . to act."

"All right, Sir!  Manage this thing . . . manage it just as you would
behind your hide-bound British laws!  We'll pass the Senator's ranch in
ten minutes.  You can telephone down to 'The Smelter City Herald.'
I'll get something ready to eat while you telephone.  Then, we'll go
right along to the sheriff."

They kicked their ponies lightly into a trot and came to the Senator's
k'raal before the noon hour.  Two or three of the ranch hands loitered
casually out to the road.  All were in blue over-alls and shirt sleeves
but one; and he was in knickerbockers.

"That's the foreman, ask him!"

"'Twould oblige me t' have the use of your telephone?"

The man in the knickerbockers tilted his hat at a rakish angle, stuck a
tooth-pick in the corner of his mouth, put his thumbs in his jacket arm
holes, shot Wayland a quick look of questioning, grinned at the old man
and nodded towards a white pergola standing apart from the veranda of
the ranch house.

"Find it there," he indicated, "drop a nickel--then, ring!"

"Did you see that look?" gritted the old Britisher between his teeth,
as the fellow sauntered away with elaborate indifference.

"Yes, but looks don't go with a jury."

"Neck-tie was effective with the likes of him in my day!"

For the third time, Wayland uttered the same sardonic laugh.  What was
happening to the old Britisher to change his point of view?

"I'll go on down to the River and prepare grub."

What Wayland was thinking, he did not say; but _what_ was passing in
the brain of the law-loving old Britisher that the rakish tilt of the
hat, the insolent angle of the tooth-pick, the spread of a man's thumbs
and feet--could break through hide-bound respect for law and elicit
reference to the court of the old-time neck-tie?

At the River, the Ranger loosened the saddle girths and put a small
kettle to boil above a fire of cottonwood chips and grass.  Then he
took out his note book and wrote the note to Eleanor which he gave to
one of the road gang for Calamity.  The note said: "We are setting out
on the Long Trail . . . the Long Trail this Nation will have to travel
before Democracy arrives . . . the trail of the Man behind the Thing
. . . the Man Higher Up."  How did the Ranger know what was going on up
at the telephone in the pergola, where British respect for law was at
one end of the wire and the handy man of the Valley at the other?

There was no bitterness in the quizzical smile with which he awaited
the old man's return; for as he lay back on the ground watching the
fire burn up, the letter brought again, not memory, but consciousness
of that seal to service, he wondered half vaguely could she know, could
she realize, did a woman _ever_ realize what her love meant to a man.
She could surely never have given such full draughts of life, of
wondrous new revealing consciousness, unless they were drinking
together from the same perennial, ever-new, ever-surprising
spring! . . .  He did not hear the footsteps till the old man spoke--

"A somehow--didna' seem--to get--them clear!  They answered; then--they
didna' answer!  _Smelter City Herald_--ye said?  'Twas strange--'twas
vera strange--A got an answer plain asking my name--then central said
'ring off! ring off! can't get them, wire out of order'!"

This time, Wayland did not laugh.  Had not the wires been out of order
since first he began to ring the bells of his little insignificant
place to a Nation's alarm?

They ate their bannocks--'Rocky Mountain dead shot' Westerners call the
slap-jacks--in silence.  While the old man still pondered mazed and
dumb, the Ranger dabbled the cups and plates in the River and recinched
the pack saddle, the little mule blowing out his sides and groaning to
ease the girth, the bronchos wisely eating to the process of
reharnessing.  The Britisher's reverence for law dies hard.  Wayland
saw the wrestle and kept silent.  A deep low boom rolled dully through
the earth in smothered rumblings and tremblings like distant thunder.

"What's that, Wayland?"

"Only the snow slides loosened by the noon-thaw slithering down the
Pass of Holy Cross;" and somehow, he could not but think of what she
had said . . . the law of the snow flake sculpturing the rocks.

The horses cropped audibly over the grasses--waiting.  The little mule
looked back--also waiting.  A whelming impulse, part of the spirit to
drink of her inspiration, part of the flesh to drink of her touch--came
over him to ride down to the ranch house, the MacDonald ranch house, to
see her--just once before setting out on the Long Trail.

"Well," he said; "which way, Mr. Matthews?"

The old Britisher moved thoughtfully towards his broncho.

"We'll try y'r sheriff--at least, we'll try him _first_."

And again the Ranger laughed.

"Don't laugh, man!  D' y' know what it means when men are driven
outside the line of law?"

The horses waded in midstream and reached down drinking, champing on
their bits.

"Well--what does it mean?"

He saw the blue of the mountain stream swirl and whirl and eddy over
the sun-dyed pebbles, singing the law of the far mountain snows.

"God knows," answered the old man slowly.  "It means disrupture.  We
slew our kings in olden times; but ye are a many headed king in this
land!  It means--perhaps, ye call it Anarchy to-day."

The yellow noon-day light sifted through the cottonwoods jewel-spangled
on the crystal blue River.  The Ranger always knew the character of the
mountains from the River: silty and milky-blue from glaciers; crystal
and green-blue from the snow.  And they rode away up the Valley from
the ranch houses towards the Pass, out beyond the bounds of the
National Forests with the trees marked two notches and one blaze;
gradually up the narrowing trail fringed by the shiny laurel bushes;
with the mountains closing closer and the spiced balsam odor raining on
the air a sifted gold dust of sunlight.  At intervals, came the dull
rumble of the snow slide, the far reverberation, the echo of the law of
the snow flake rolling away the stone; the smash of the great law
drama, the titans behind the mountains.

It was one of those frequent mountain formations where a Valley seems
to terminate in a blank wall.  You turn a buttress of rock, and you
find the sheer wall opening before you in a trail that climbs to a
notch on the sky line between forested flanks.  The notch of blue is a
Pass.

"Anyway, Mr. Matthews, we are splitting the air, now!  We are doing
more than sawing air."

They had put their horses to a sharp trot along the trail winding up
the River.  The water was gurgling over the polished pebbles with
little leaps and glints of fire.  Presently, the mountains had closed
behind them.  The River was tumbling with noisy rush in a succession of
cascades, and the trail wound back from the rocky bank through circular
flats or what were locally known as "bottoms."

"Sheriff live this way?" shouted Matthews; for the roar of the little
stream filled the canyon.

"Has a ranch at the foot of the Pass."

"It won't be wasting time, anyway," said the old Britisher.

Again, Wayland smiled.  If it would _not_ be wasting time; then, they
were already in pursuit of the outlaws.  What was it in the insolent
look of the Senator's ranch hand that had suddenly dashed the doughty
Briton's reverence for the instrument of the law?

A barb wire fence tacked to spindly cottonwood trees marked the line of
an irregular homestead; and the Ranger swung into a gate extemporized
from barb wire on two adjustable posts.  Behind the gate, stood a log
shack; on the windows, cheap lace curtains; behind the lace curtains, a
vague movement of peeping faces and a querulous termagant voice: "I
ain't a goin' to have you mixed up in no scrap; so there, Dan Flood!"

Wayland dismounted and knocked on the door with his riding stock.  It
opened on an anaemic sulphur face with blond hair screwed in curl
papers over a full row of gold headlights where an enterprising dentist
had engrafted as much of Klondike as possible.

"Sheriff Flood in?" the Ranger raised his hat.

"Oh, how j' do, Mr. Wayland."  All the curl papers nodded like clover
tops in the wind, while the coy brows arched, and an inviting smile
played round the simpering headlights.  "No, he ain't!  Dan ain't in!"
The curl papers nodded again and the gold teeth simpered again.

"Is he--_home_?"  The word home came out with the force of a bullet.

"No, he ain't home!  Mr. Flood ain't home!  The sheriff was called
'way!  Is there any message?"

Wayland stood back and watched the fray.  The old man gazed full at the
frowsy apparition in the doorway.  If dagger looks could have stabbed
her, the lady would have dropped dead stuck full of as many daggers as
a cushion is of pins.  The gold headlights suffered eclipse behind a
pair of tightly perked lips; and one hand darted hold of the door knob.

"Yes," he said, looking fixedly at the deep V of ash-colored skin where
the lady had turned back the neck of her pink wrapper in imitation of
gowns seen in the Sunday supplement of "The Smelter City Herald."
"There was murder done on the Rim Rocks last night!  There's festering
bodies lying on top of yon Mesas!  'Tis a job for the sheriff, not for
an outsider--"

"Yes, Sir," said the gold headlights, "I think he's gone to see about
it."

He had looked her slowly over again from the blondine hair and the
ash-colored V of unclean skin and waistless slop of slattern wrapper to
clock work stockings and high heeled slippers.

"A ha' ma doubts he's sprintin' fr' the back door this minute!  Are ye
the sheriff's--woman?" and oddly enough the lady didn't flush; but the
faintest gloss came over the saffron skin--of what?  It was the same
nonchalant, wordless insolence that had played in the eyes of the man
who had come out from the Senator's ranch.

"Yes, Sir, I'll deliver your message a' right," flickered the
headlights reassuringly.

The old man stood stolidly and scorched the lady's eyes.

"How long since y'r sheriff thing set out?  Did he break loose by the
back door?"

"There ain't no back door," snapped the headlights; and the front door
slammed in their faces.  Wayland burst in a peal of laughter.

"'Tis no laughing matter!  'Tis bad enough t' depend on that broken
reed of a dastard coward sheriff hidin' under the bed!  A've a mind to
go back an' have him oot; but that--pot ash pate--" what else the old
man called her was more truthful than elegant for an expurgated age.
They replaced the post of the barbed wire gate in its loop and mounted
their horses.

"Well, Sir?" asked Wayland.  "I don't wish to offend your British sense
of law; but which way now?"

The old man left the reins hanging on the broncho's neck.  The horses
began cropping the grass.  The Ranger was fumbling at his stirrup.

"A'm sore puzzled, Wayland!  'Tis not in the blood of a British born to
go _outside_ law.  Y'r no thinkin' that; are y', Wayland?"

"I am saying nothing!  The law protects them in their lawlessness.  It
doesn't protect us in our lawfulness.  The American citizen is the
law-maker.  There is only one thing for an American citizen to do--get
to work and enforce his laws--"

"Then--God's name, Wayland, go ahead and do it!  Take the lead!  A'll
follow!  This trail go behind the mountain?"

"Yes, it brings us round behind!  They have the start of us by three
hours; but they'll camp to-night somewhere along the Lake Behind the
Peak.  Beyond that, there are some mighty bad slides.  These rains have
loosened snows.  They'll hardly cross the slides beyond the lake but by
daylight.  If we can reach the lake to-day, we'll have a chance at 'em."

"Wayland, A'm on the last lap of _my_ trail!  It doesn't matter what
happens to me; but have you thought what might happen when we catch up
on them?  Those fellows are out to kill.  We are out to arrest.  Have
you thought what that might mean at close quarters?"

"It's close quarters I'm seeking," said Wayland, "though it's hardly
fair to drag you into the fight.  All I want is a man as a witness
who's got red blood that won't turn yellow.  This Nation has been
cowering behind the line of law, while the looters and skinners have
disarmed our very firing line.  It's time somebody risked his neck to
reverse the order--"

"Git epp," said the old man roughly to his broncho.

The little pack mule took to the trail ears back at an easy lope; and
the riders set off up the Pass at the rocking-chair trot of the
plains-horseman.  Gradually, the mountains crowded closer, in
weather-stained rock walls, with a far whish as of wind or waters
coming up from the canyon bottom; the sky overhead narrowing to a cleft
of blue with the frayed pines and hemlocks hanging from the granite
blocks, fragile as ferns against the sky.  You looked back; the rocks
had closed to a solid wall; you looked down; the river filling the
canyon with a hollow hush had dwarfed to a glistening silver thread
with the forest dwarfed banks of moss.  It was a sombre world, all the
more shadowy from that cleft of blue over head where an eagle circled
with lonely cry.

The Pass was like the passage of birth and death from life to larger
life.  On the other side of the mountain lay the sun-bathed Valley and
the Ridge with its silver cataracts and the opal peak with the
glistening snow cross.  This side, the Mountain in the Valley of the
Shadow became giant beveled masonry, tier on tier, criss-crossed and
scarred by the iced cataracts of a billion years--no sound but the
raucous scream of the lone eagle, the hollow hush of the far River, the
tinkling of the water-drip freezing as it fell.  Then, where the cleft
of blue smote the rocks with sunlight, the doors of the mountains would
open again to larger life in another Valley.

The horses were no longer trotting.  They were climbing and blowing and
pausing where the trail of the Pass took sharp turns, back and forward,
up and up, till the eagle was circling below.  Both men had dismounted
and were walking Indian file to the rear, Wayland carrying his own
cased rifle.  The trail was now running along the edge of an escarpment
no wider than a saddle, sheer drop below, sheer wall above.

"How would they come out from the gully on this trail, Wayland?  I have
been watching for the tracks.  They're not ahead of us."

"Gully ends in a blind wall above.  As I make it, they'd push their
nags up and come down on the Pass trail somewhere below the precipice
ahead.  We can take our time; I have been watching.  There are no
tracks ahead.  The trail above is worse than this.  Devil takes care of
his own; or they would have broken their necks long ago coming back and
forward.  We'll let 'em go down to the lake first.  They'll go into the
trap.  It's a lake mostly ice this time of the year.  There's an old
punt sometimes used by hunters.  It'll take them an hour to cross with
their horses.  We'll let them camp at the lake.  We could pot them
there, if we had a sheriff worth his salt."

"'Tis a great trail, Wayland!  Minds me of my days building bridges in
the Rockies!  'Tisn't just a matter o' courage to follow these
precipice trails: it's temperament!  'Tis something in the pit o' the
stomach!  A mind one of our best engineers; he could meet Chinese
navvies with their knives out: couldn't cross one of the precipices to
save his life without blinders like a horse: we had to blindfold him so
he wouldn't know till he'd crossed.  How deep do you call it here?"

"About 7,000 feet drop, I think.  This is the top of the Pass.  We go
down after we leave the precipice!  See--? the horses know it!  They
are taking their top-turn rest."

The two men glanced below.  In the shadowed depths, they could see the
River tearing down a white fume, a pantherine thing leaping--leaping--;
and the hollow roar of water filled the canyon with a quiver that was
tangible.  Far below, the eagle flew lazily, lifting and falling to the
throb of the canyon winds.  Suddenly, the air was cut by a piercing
whistle.  Both men jumped.

"It's only a marmot."  The Ranger pointed over his shoulder to the
little gray beast sitting on the face of the rock.  "Curious place,
this Pass!  There is an echo here--if it were not that we don't want to
announce ourselves, I'd let you hear it.  If you yell or sing, you can
hear the thing dancing along that opposite wall--Kind of uncanny, the
echo voice, in the mist here sometimes."

But the whistle of the marmot had also startled the horses.  The tired
pack mule gave a hobbling jump and came to a stand.  A stone no larger
than a horse-shoe kicked loose, tottered on the edge, and went bounding
over.  It struck the tier of rock below with clattering echo, displaced
another stone twice its size, then bounced--bounced--and a slither of
slaty rock the size of a house wrenched out--shot into mid-air with
crash and sharp clappering echoes--Then the Pass was filled with the
thundering roll.  They saw it sink--sink--sink and fade, while the echo
still rocketted amid the rock tops--sink--sink--sink--no larger than a
spool in the purple shadows, till with a plunge it disappeared.

"Whew, it _would_ be going if one went over."  The old man mowed the
sweat from his forehead and drew a breath.

On the instant, the hollow chasm of the canyon split to the crash of a
rifle shot that rocketted and quaked and repeated in splintering
echoes; and a bullet pinged at Wayland's feet.

"That's splitting the air for you--Wayland."

"Drop down, Sir," urged the Ranger, pulling the old frontiersman to
shelter of the upper rocks.  "They have come out above.  They have
heard that cursed stone.  That's only a chance shot to learn where we
are.  They can't come behind.  They have got to go down ahead--"

"And the fat's in the fire; for my rifle's gone with the horse,"
deplored the old man woefully; for mule and bronchos had galloped along
the trail with the clatter of a cavalcade through the canyon.  Wayland
handed the old man his own rifle and took the six shooter from his belt
beneath the leather coat.

"They won't understand this pursuit at all," explained Wayland.
"Sheriff Flood is the guarantee of safety for any criminal in the
country side.  They'll think it a citizens' posse.  Where this trail
comes down at the end of the precipice is a crag.  Will you hide behind
that, sir?  I'll go above and head them down.  I'm not asking you to
risk your life.  They'll not see you till they gallop down."

"But you are risking your own life if you go up?"

"So does the fellow who has slipped on a banana peel," said Wayland.

CHAPTER XIII

THE MAN ON THE JOB

The two men proceeded along the precipice trail of the Pass.  The
shouting river below boisterous from the full flood of noon-day thaw
began to hush.  By the shadows, the Ranger knew that the afternoon was
waning.  The echoes from the shot still rocked in sharp crepitating
knocks as of stone against stone, fainter and fading.  Then a quiver of
wind met their faces.  The chasm opened to the fore like a gate, or a
notch in the serrated ridge of the sky-line; and the precipice trail
dropped over the edge of the crag to the scooped hollow of a slope
where rock slide or avalanche had plowed a groove in the bevelled
masonry of the precipice.

"This is the place," indicated Wayland.

From the shoulder of the higher slope came a little narrow indurated
trail scarcely a hand's width, marked by the cleft foot-prints of a
mountain goat.  Where the path came down to the main trail of the Pass,
jutted a huge rock left high and dry on its slide to the bottom of the
gorge.

"Keep behind the other side of that, sir!  They can't possibly see you."

"How do you know that trail comes from the Ridge gully?  Looks to me
like a goat track."

"Because I built it!  You can see the N. F. trail sign--one notch and
one blaze on that scrub juniper.  Up on the Mesas, we were _off_ the
Forests.  Here, we are back on them.  You may not know it, sir; but
this canyon is part of the region Moyese wants withdrawn for
homesteads.  You could homestead a reservoir for Smelter City here--pay
a German or a Swede three-hundred to sit on this site--then sell for a
couple of million to the Smelter City gang.  They would get the suckers
in the East to buy the bonds to pay for it.  A fellow in the Sierras
located a hundred water power sites that way."

The old Britisher was not following the Ranger's reasoning in the least.

"Then, if we are really on the National Forests, that is your
territory, and we have the legal right to make an arrest?"

Wayland laughed outright.  If you don't see why, then you do not know
the stickling of a Briton's sense of law and a Scotchman's conscience.
Matthews took up his station behind the rock that abutted on the trail.

He saw the Ranger hasten back along the face of the precipice, stop
where the rock offered foothold and begin slowly climbing almost
vertically.  At first, it was going up the tiers of a broken stone
stair.  Then, the weathered ledge gave place to slant shale.  He saw
Wayland dig his heels for grip, grasp a sharp edge overhead, and hoist
himself to the overhanging branch of a recumbent pine; then, scramble
along the fallen trunk to a ledge barely wide enough for footing.
Along this, he cautiously worked, face in, hand over hand from rock
block to rock block, sticking fingers among the mossed crevices,
fumbling the pebbles from the slate edges, and so round out of sight
behind a flying buttress of masonry and back in view again a tier
higher.

Just once, the watcher felt a tremor for the rash climber.  Wayland's
head was on a level with the crest of another ledge, his face to the
rock, his left hand gripping a shoot of mountain laurel, his right
groping the upper rocks.  The old man saw the shrub jerk loose, moss,
roots and all--he held his breath for the coming crash--it was all
over.  Wayland's left arm flung out to ward off the spatter of small
stones; then, the right arm had clutched the spindly bole of a creeping
juniper--his body lurched out, hung, swayed, lifted; and the Ranger
disappeared among the shrubbery of the upper trail.

The old man took a deep breath.

"And this is the Man on the Job," he said.  He drew behind his shelter
and waited.  "The same breed o' men after all, in different harness."

He had not noticed before, but there, ahead, where the black chasm of
the Pass opened portals to the sunny blue of another valley, lay a
lake, the Lake Behind the Peak, spangled with light, marbled like onyx
or malachite, with the sheen of a jewel.  Almost at his feet below, the
near end of it lay.  He could have tossed a pebble into it,
seven-thousand feet below, where the white foaming river came ramping
through a great pile of moraine that dammed up this end of the Pass to
the width of a bridle trail.  The outlaws would have to cross the lake
to escape from the Pass; and almost, he thought, he saw the old punt at
the far end, which Wayland had said hunters sometimes used.

The white butterflies flitted past his hiding place out to the light of
the sun.  The eagle was soaring strong-winged, swerving and lifting and
falling in an insolence of languid power.  The silent Pass quivered to
the throb of waters.  But what was doing with the Ranger?  Not a sound
came from the upper trail but the tinkle of hidden springs down the
rocks.  He knew if he uttered a shout, the echo would take up his call.
An hour passed: two hours.  Ghost shadows came creeping into the
canyon.  The butterflies had fluttered out to the blue portal where the
rocks opened doors to the sun.  The rampant roar of the river was
quieting to the hollow hush.  The old man rose, walked along the
precipice, came back to his shelter, sat, stood up, examined the rifle,
looked ahead where the horses had wandered on, fidgeted, and bemoaned
the years that prevented pursuit up the rock face.  He knew by the
light and the hush that it must be almost five o 'clock.

And at five o'clock in the ranch house back in the Valley, Eleanor was
lying in her room with her face buried in Wayland's note, praying as
only the young pray, with the worst and the best of their nature in the
prayer; for where such love comes, all goes into the incense of the
fire that goes up from the altar--the best and the worst of the inmost
heart: an apotheosis of "give-me" and an utter abandonment of
"let-me-give."  By and by, when we grow older, we leave both the "give
me" and the "let-me-give" to God.

The old man knew it must be almost six o'clock; for the light came
aslant the gap and the chill of the upper snow crept down from the
mountain.  A pretty business this, it seemed to him: twenty miles back
of beyond; horses sent on at random ahead; a gang of murderers in
hiding above--Matthews walked boldly along the precipice trail, saw the
eagle below circling, still circling; heard a hawk skirr and scold from
a dead branch--Then, he deliberately pointed his voice to the rock wall
of the echo across the gorge and let out a yell that split the
welkin--A thousand--ten thousand--multitudinous eldritch laughing
echoes came jibbering and mumbling and giggling and shrilling back from
the rock, filling the Pass with chattering, knocking sounds that
skipped from stone to stone.

Instantly, a shot, a shout, a bang, the rocking crash of echoes--mixed
with ear-splitting, rocketting shots--a crunch of feet--the old man
dashed to the hiding of his crag.  A spurt of gravel mid showers of
dust and snorting of horses--Not on the trail at all but almost over
his back, slithered and slid and bunched horses and men, pell mell, the
white horse leading the way braced back on its haunches, the fellow in
the yellow slicker rumbling a volcano of lurid curses--The outlaws had
not followed the goat track at all but jumped sheer from the higher
slope to the Pass trail.

Shouting "Stop!--Stop!--I command you in the name of the State to
stop--!" the old man sprang to the middle of the trail flourishing the
rifle above his head.

"State be damned," yelled the fellow in the oil-skin slicker.  Never
pausing, turning only to shoot at wild random, the outlaws had
tumbled--stumbled--slid down the slatey slope for the lake.

There was the pound--pound--the huffing of saddle leather--and a horse
came spurring along the Pass trail at reckless gallop.  The old man
flung himself athwart--a rider in sheep-skin leggings, hat far back,
came round the rock at break neck pace looking over his shoulder as if
pursued--One jump--the old frontiersman had the horse's bridle!  The
shock threw the beast's hind legs clear over the edge jarring the rider
almost to the animal's neck.  Next--the old man was looking down the
barrel of the outlaw's big repeater--With a mighty swing, Matthews
clubbed his rifle on the other's wrist.  He might have scruples as to
law and conscience; but he knew how and when and where to hit, did the
Briton with the Scotch-Canadian blood.  Also he knew when to let
go--There was a flash--the rock splintering crash of echo, the
whinnying scream and leap of the horse shot by the falling
weapon--Rider and beast hurtled backwards, the man's foot caught to one
stirrup--There was the crackling of slate and shale--the gash and rasp
and wrench of loosening rock masses sliding--down--down--down and yet
down, with knocking echoes; with laughter of terrified scream from the
echo rock across the gorge--pound and plunge from ledge to ledge--the
horse's body turning twice as it struck and bounced out--a cloud of
dust--the shout, the blasphemy, the cry of rage, then the shrill scream
of death terror that echoed and echoed--The old man looked down!  There
was a pounding of the stones--a faint far rebound and the darkness
below swallowed over a fading swirl at the bottom of the canyon.  He
heard, he thought, he heard the engulfing gurgle of the waters, while
the shrill scream still jibbered and faded along the echo ledge.

"By violence ye lived--by violence ye die--over the precipice ye go as
ye sent the mangled boy to the bloody death!"

Then the Ranger was tumbling down the goat track in a slither of shale.

"Come on--that was well done, sir!  Wish we'd sent them all over to the
very bottom of Hell--!  I'd stalked that fellow apart from the others
when you signaled--come on--we'll catch the rest at the lake--there's a
fellow wounded--you must have nipped one when you shot this
morning--join me at the lake," and leaving Matthews to follow by the
foot trail, the delirious Ranger went tearing exultant down the stone
slide.  Water-muffled shots sounded from the lake.  Wayland paused in
his head-long descent.  The five outlaws were shoving the punt from the
shore with the bronchos swimming in tow.  The stolen wagon horses, lay
shot on the shore.  One of the outlaws was being supported by the
others.  It was the man in the yellow slicker.

A great wave went over Wayland of something he had never before known.
It pounded at his temples.  It set his heart going in a force pump.  It
blew his lungs out, and set the whip cord muscles itching to go--to
go--he wanted to shout with joy of power--power that pursued and caught
and crushed--and trembled with overplus of intoxicated strength--He
knew if he could lay his hand on Crime at that moment he could crush
the life out of the thing's throat; and there was a parchedness that
was not thirst, a tingling to clinch that Criminal Thing menacing the
Nation, to clinch and strangle it to a death not honored in the code of
white-corpuscled anaemic study-chair reformers.

"Well," he said, as the other came limping down to the shore, "I didn't
think there could be enough of the savage in me to enjoy a manhunt."

The old Briton looked queerly at the young fellow.

"A'm beginnin'--," he said slowly, "A'm beginnin' to understand y'r
lynch law in this country--an' the _why_."

"What do you make of it?" asked Wayland, too excited to notice the
other's abstraction.

"A'm beginnin' to understand if y' monkey with the law much longer in
this land, the whole Nation will go locoed like you, Wayland--with a
blood thirst for righteousness--a white passion for the square
deal--an' God pity--that day!"

The fugitives had reached the far shore of the lake, landed and were
riding off when a second thought seemed to bring one man back to the
water's edge.  He stooped, heaved up a rock, threw it through the
bottom of the old punt.

"You'll have to do better than that to keep me from crossing," said
Wayland.

The fellow was aiming his rifle.  Wayland and Matthews jumped behind
the big hemlocks.

"He's fulling a skin bag wi' water."

"Then, they intend to cross the Desert," inferred Wayland; "but they'll
have to go farther to slip me."

One of the riders was scanning back with a field glass.

"Looking for number six--Of all the colossal effrontery--they are
actually going to speak."

The fellow nearest shore lowered his rifle and trumpeted both hands.

"Speak louder--can't hear ye."  Matthews had gone to the edge of the
lake.  The answer came faint and muffled.

"Where's--our--pardner--?"

"Hold up y'r hands--all five," roared back Matthews.

The arms of all but the hurt man went above heads, hands facing.

"Y'll find y'r man's carcass in the bloody mess where ye sent the
sheep--! d' y'--see yon eagle?--'Tis pickin' his bones--" roared
Matthews through funnelled palms; and both jumped back to the shelter
of the hemlocks.  The outlaws drew together to confer.

"They don't believe us," said Wayland.  "They'll camp in the timber
over there for the night and wait.  All right, my friends!  You'll not
have to wait long; no longer than it takes you, sir, to find our pack
mule and the stray bronchs, while I build a raft.  We can't cross the
lower end for the moraine; and we can't cross the upper end for the
ice; and it's too cold to risk swimming."

Matthews had headed the horses and pack mule back from an open glade
and hobbled their fore feet.  Then Wayland began chopping down small
trees.  They saw the figures of the outlaws against the twilight of the
gap ride away from the far margin of the lake.  Then only did the
Ranger build a little fire behind the biggest hemlocks, an Indian's
tiny chip fire, not "the big white-man's blaze."  On this, they cooked
their supper, lake trout hauled out while they waited, and flap jacks,
with a tin plate for a frying pan.

"Anyway," said the Ranger wiping the smoke tears from his eyes, "the
smoke keeps off the mosquitoes."

"Mosquitoes, pah!  That shows y're Yale for all y'r good work this day!
A have no seen one yet."

Wayland's answer was to light his pipe.  "It's either bear's grease, or
smoke between bites," he laughed.

They had unsaddled horses and were sitting on a log watching the
animals crop through the deep grasses.

The frontiersman uttered a sigh.  "'Tis like a taste of the good old
days, the days well nigh gone for ever; the smell of the bark fire; an'
th' tang of the kinnikinick; an' the cinnamon cedars; and the air like
champagne; an' the stars prickin' the crown o' the hoary old peaks like
diamonds; an' the little waves lappin' an' lavin' an' whisperin' an'
tellin' of the woman y' luve.  An' care?  Care, man?  There wasna' a
care heavier than dandelion down.  'Twas sleep like a deep drink, an'
up an' away in the mornin', chasin' a young man's hopes to the end o'
the Trail!  A suppose th' Almighty meant t' anchor men, or He wouldna'
permit the buildin' of toons!  Once A was in New York!  A did na' see
but one patch o' sunlight twenty stories overhead!  Th' car things
screeched an' rulled an' the folks--the wimmen wi' awfu' stern wheeler
hats, an' the men--hurryin'--hurryin'!--Wayland, d' they get it?
There's only twenty-four hours in a day--they can't catch any more by
hurryin'--what are they hurryin' for?  Do they get it--what they're
hurryin' for?  Do they get anywhere?  D' they sit down joyous at night?
A heard some laugh--It was not joyous!  Do they get anything down there
in the awfu' heat?"

Wayland laughed.  "I don't know," he said.  "Care isn't light as
dandelion fluff!  I'll bet on that."

The roar of waters below the moraine softened and quieted.  There was a
chorus of little waves lipping and whispering among the reeds.  A whole
aeon of resinous sunbeams breathed their essence through the dark from
the spicy evergreens.  One need not attempt to guess of what Wayland
was thinking.  He had forgotten his companion's presence till the old
man spoke.

"A suppose, Wayland, you are only one of an army of kiddie boys on the
job out here?"

Wayland absently roused himself.

"Land Service and Reclamation men have tougher jobs and less glory.
All we have to do is sit tight and it's a pretty good place to sit
tight in--this out-door world.  Different with the other fellows!
They're hamstrung by the red tape of office, or blackguarded by some
peanut politician who is scoring an opponent!  There was Walker down at
Durango, shot examining a coal fraud.  He was a Land Office man; and
his murderers have not even been punished.  Then, there were the two
chaps, who ran the rapids before the Gunnison Tunnel could be built;
though that's been exaggerated with a lot of magazine hog-wash to make
a fellow sick!  Biggest job there was the engineer's work.  Do you know
he drove that six mile tunnel from both ends and, when the two ends
met, they were not two inches off?  Hog-wash and dish-water hacks
spread themselves in the magazines all over those chaps running the
rapids!  You've run ten times worse rapids, yourself, on Saskatchewan
and MacKenzie hundreds of times.  Yet those chaps--not one of
them--noted the wonder of a tunnel driven from both ends coming out
exactly even.  Why, the poor ignorant foreign workmen cried when they
met from both ends, got hold of one fellow's wrist through the mud wall
and pulled him through bodily, cried like kids at the victory of it!
Your town hack didn't know what it meant to be a sand hog under ground
for years and come through to daylight like that.  The ignorant
foreigner knew.  I guess a good dozen of 'em had sacrificed their lives
to the work.  They knew the quiet engineer fellow had conquered the
earth; and that fellow doesn't get the salary of a Wall Street
stenographer--a way Uncle Sam has.  They'd give such a man a title and
a fifty thousand a year pension in England or Germany.

"Then, there was Fessenden, unearthed a lot of fraud in Oregon and got
himself crucified--got the bounce; had broken his health in that sort
of thing; got fired because he proved up that some smug politicians had
caused the death of an old couple by jumping their homestead claim and
driving them to penury.  Then, there was Carrington.  He was on the
Desert Reclamation Project; took his bride in on their honeymoon;
hundreds of miles from the railroad.  She was delicate--lungs; poor
fellow thought perhaps camp life would cure her.  She died there in the
heat.  Two or three of the men gave up their jobs to help bring the
body out."  Wayland land paused, lost in thought.  "They got the body
out all right; but, the horror of it, Carrington went off his head!
Know an engineering chap tramped the Sierras for a hundred miles dogged
by a spotter from one of the railroads--but what's the use of talking
about it?  These things have to be done; and these are the men on the
job."

"The Men on the Job," slowly repeated Matthews, "the men we make earls
and premiers of in Britain; but who of your big public cares one jot?
Time you wakened up as a Nation."

"You are using almost the same words as Moyese.  He says the public
doesn't care a damn, wouldn't raise a hand to stand for the rights of
one of us, pays us less than dagoes earn.  I guess Moyese doesn't
understand our point of view, can't take in why we keep at it."

The wind came through the trees a phantom harper.  The little waves
lapped and whispered.  The pine needles clicked pixy castanets; and the
moon beams sifted through the trees a silver dust.

"Why do you?  Why do you keep on the job?" asked the old man.

"Hanged if I know," answered Wayland uncomfortably.

"A saw a man on the job to-day risk his life twice and think no more
about it than if he had been out for a walk.  If a man in England, if a
man in Germany, if a man in Italy, yes by thunder, Wayland, if a man on
the job in pagan Turkey had done what you did to-day, he'd be given a
V. C. accordin' to the Turk, and a title and a pension for life."

"I don't despair of a cross myself, when Moyese hears what happened
to-day.  It'll be a double cross with a G. B.; but, speaking of cross,
as we have to cross the lake, don't you think you'd better snatch a
little sleep?"

And so the two men, one representing the chivalry of the old West, the
other the chivalry of the new, stretched out to sleep with coats for
pillows, while the flood-waters went singing through the stones, and
the little waves came lipping and whispering, and the low boom of the
snow slides rolled through the chambered hollows of canyon and gorge.
Absurd, wasn't it, but the Ranger was not dreaming about the bevelling
trowel of the titan mountain gods?  He went to sleep dreaming of the
star visible from the other side of the Holy Cross, dreaming dreams
that men and women have dreamed since time began; of drinking,
drinking, and drinking yet again, of life and love and blessedness from
the fount of human lips; of the seal that should be the seal to
service, not to self; of the gates ajar to a new life like the notch of
sky where the rocks of the Pass opened portals to the blue valley.
Would he have dreamed less joyously if he had known that the portals of
the Pass led to the avalanche and the desert and the alkali death?  Who
shall say that love did not pay the toll?  And in him rioted the
savagery of the fighter who wanted to seize his foe by the throat.

CHAPTER XIV

ON THE GAME TRAIL

The dull boom of a snow-cornice tumbling over some high cliff on the far
side of the lake awakened the Ranger to the chill darkness of mountain
night just before dawn.  The moon had sunk behind the sky-line of the
peaks; and the little lake laving among the reeds lay inky in the shadow
of the heavy mist.

Wayland listened.  The deep breathing of the horses round the ashes of
the mosquito smudge guided him across to saddles.  He placed saddles,
pack trees and provisions on the raft.  Then, he wakened the old man and
pulled the grunting horses to their feet.  A little riffle, half wind,
half light, stirred the lake mist, revealing glare patches of snow
reflection in the water.

"Hoh! man, but y'r old peaks have a nip in the air at three in the
mornin'!"  Matthews came down to the raft chaffing his hands.  "That's a
job worthy a woodsman," he observed, holding the halter reins while the
Ranger got a couple of long poles.

A dozen saplings had been mortised to a couple of cottonwoods.

"They may take water; but they'll not sink; and they'll not tip,"
declared Wayland.

Reeds and willows had been used in place of nails.  Two or three of the
logs were spliced to grip the end cottonwoods firmly.  The two men
stepped on the raft.

"Why didn't you go round the upper end?"

"Ice," answered Wayland.

"Too deep for poling in the middle?" asked Matthews.

"That's why I'm going to creep along shore."

"It'ull keep y' in the shadows."

With a prod of his pole, Wayland shoved off, and the frontiersman
lengthened out the leading lines for the horses.  The Ranger smiled
whimsically to find the reverse side of Holy Cross peak, up-side down in
the water, and he set to figuring out what sort of triangular lines
thought-waves must follow to connect his thought of that peak etched in
the bottom of the lake with her thought on the other side of a peak up in
the sky.

"Steady, man!  Slow up!  There's a fallen tree with its rump stuck
ashore!  A' don't want to warp ye in by snaggin' round; an' that mule
brute is thinkin' o' sittin' down."

The bronchos had plunged to the cold dip with deep grunts, but the mule
braced his legs and brayed at the morning.  The frontiersman said things
between set teeth that might have been objurgations to the soul of Satan
or the race of mules.  Wayland shoved on the pole.  The mule pulled.  The
logs of the raft began to creak.  "Look out, sir, we're splitting!  Let
that doggon brute go--"

And the raft swerved out, the horses swimming, the freed mule plunging
along the wooded shore, Wayland thrusting his long pole deep, almost to
his hand-grip, to find bottom.

"There's a nasty under current from the upper river," he said.

"Let her go, there--! let her go t' th' current--tack her an' the current
wull swerve ye int' the other side!  More men lose their lives by poling
too hard than lettin' go!  Catch the current and let her go."

The old man had twisted the halter ropes under his feet.  He seized a
pole and swerved the raft to the current, pointing in to the other side.
They could hear the roar of the wild mountain stream pouring a maelstrom
down from the glare ice and snow of the upper meadows.  The next plunge
of the pole missed bottom.  There was a yielding creak of logs.  The raft
poised, and spun round.

"Let her go, man!  We'll wriggle her in below!"

"Then loose your halter ropes, they're pulling us round."

They tossed the ropes free.  Wayland waved his pole to head the bronchos
across.  They heard the mule squealing at the head of the lake.

"She can't sink--wriggle her round, Wayland!"

The raft spun twice to the under-pull, took an inch or two of water, and
swirled into the quiet shadows of the far shore.

"Minds me of that story of Napoleon!  Do you carry bridges in y'r
pockets, too, Wayland?" asked the old man, as the Ranger gave a long prod
that sent the raft grating ashore.

"What story?" asked Wayland.

"Oh, Boney came to a river too deep for swimming cavalry.  General
ordered engineer fellow to get 'em across!  Man began to draw maps.  When
he came to Napoleon with his blue print plans, he found a common soldier
fellow had pontooned 'em all across!"

"Did the big fellow get a leg up on his job; or did the soldier fellow
get the bounce for going outside regulations?"

"That is possible, too."  The old man was handing off the saddles and
camp kit.

"If you'll wait here, sir, I'll go along for the horses!  I don't know
the trails along on this side!  It's outside the N. F!"

There was no moonlight to guide him; but there was the wall of blue sky
where the mountains opened; and he followed up the lake shore with a
sense of feel more than sight for one of those little indurated game
tracks that would lead back over the stones to the trail that the outlaws
had seemed to follow.  If you think it an easy thing to walk over a pile
of moraine by the obscure light preceding dawn--try it!  The great
moraines flank the mountains in petrified billows stranded on the shores
of time from the ice ages, in stones from the size of a spool to a house.
Step on the small stones; and they roll, bringing down the whole bank in
a miniature slide under your feet!  Pick your way over the sharp edges of
the big rocks; and the glazed moisture is slippery as ice; but he, whose
foot hold fumbles, has no business in the mountain world; and the Ranger
swung from crest to crest of the pointed rocks, safely shrouded in the
lake mist, guided solely by the blank glare of sky between the mountain
walls.

He could hear the tinkle of waters down the ledges on his right; and the
little flutter of wind riffling through the Pass sucking up the mists
forewarned dawn.  He had climbed the roll of stone slowly, picking each
step, for, perhaps, two-hundred feet, when that trail sense of _feel_
made him stoop to examine the ground.  The roll of moraine he had climbed
met another stone billow; and between the two ran a groove, a little
narrow hardened tracing where the tracks of game going to and from
watering place had packed and worked in between the rolling pebbles the
ice dust of a million years.

This, then, was the trail that the outlaws must have followed away from
the lake.  He stooped to examine closer.  There were horse tracks.  Had
his own horses stumbled up from the lake along this trail?  It would lead
back to the camp fire of the night before.  Better reconnoitre while
there was still the hiding of the mist.

He looked back.  The lake was obliterated by the mist curling up; but
above he could see the black rocks of the precipice trail as if the Pass
behind had closed its doors against retreat; and was it imagination, or
did he see, an eagle soaring, strong-winged, majestically out from the
rocks in curves of insolent power?  Memory of the nauseating horror came
over him in a physical wave; and curiously enough, he kept hearing the
soft voice of the Senator's scoffing question: "Who of the public gives
one damn?"  It was easier sitting smug inside the firing line.  He knew
men in the Service who would call him a fool for going out on this
present quest; and he knew others whose jealousy would say it was all
done for self-advertising; and he knew also that he might be dismissed
for going out beyond the letter in order to fulfil the spirit of the law;
but preceding the horror of the precipice trail, was that other memory of
the dead boy lying at the foot of the Rim Rocks beside the writhing mass
of mutilated sheep.

The Ranger followed along the game trail.  Who was it had said that the
only difference between charcoal and diamond was that one was soft and
the other hard?  Was that what ailed the Nation?  Had the fine edge of
citizenship dulled?  Was the Nation losing the fine edge of distinction
between right and wrong?

Another little flutter of wind set the restless mists boiling.

"Strange it is hot so early," thought Wayland.  Fir trees stood out from
the shifting gray haze.  Among them, did he see shadows moving?  They
might be deer coming down to water.  Involuntarily, he stepped behind
some alder brush off the trail.  Another flutter of wind thinning the
turbid mist.  There was a whiff of camp smoke.  Through the mist, he
could make out figures not a hundred yards away--five horses ready for
travel, four men clumsily lifting a fellow in cow-boy slicker into his
saddle.  The man fell forward over the pummel.  The group seemed
undecided what to do.  Then, picked out--distinct--deliberate--coming
over the stones from the lake side--leisurely, lazily, careful, soft
footsteps with rests between--The Ranger would not have been surprised to
see the missing outlaw limp from the mist--Then, the head of his own
errant mule bobbed forward, and another roll of mist came up from the
lake.  Wayland caught the trailing halter, headed the amazed little
animal back down the goat track with an urgent kick and sprang after it
to a clatter of rolling stones.  When the clamor sank, he heard the pound
of hoofs as the outlaws galloped in the other direction.  Five paces
farther, he found both the bronchos nosing consolingly round the mule.
Wayland emitted a deep breath of relief.  If he had waited five minutes
longer at the raft, they would have had his horses.  It was all in the
difference between being on the wrong and the right side of five minutes.

"Y' don't need t' tell me we're goin' South an' down--We might be goin'
to the bottomless pit.  The wind's like a furnace."

"Off the Desert," explained the Ranger.

The sun had risen high above the peaks.  The mists had receded to belts
and wisps of cloud against the forests.  Waters tumbling wind-blown from
the ledges were swelling to a chorus.  Little cross bills and jays that
had come round the breakfast camp still followed the pack train.

"As this is off y'r National Forests, A suppose y' couldn't have jumped
into the bunch an' arrested every man-jack of 'em?"

"Not without being a target for five shots while they would have been
targets for only one."

"We'd have strung 'em up in the good old days, an' sent for the sheriff
to clean up the remnants."

They had left the goat track and dipped down a shaggy green hollow
between mountains that seemed to slope to lakes of pure light above a
blue open plain.

"Any citizen can arrest a law breaker whereever found.  Our badge is
supposed to increase that privilege; but the crime was committed just a
stone's throw _off_ the grazing ground in the National Forests.  We'd
have to turn our prisoners over to Sheriff Flood.  How long do you think
he'd keep 'em in custody?  They'd escape while he was having an attack of
'look-the-other-way--'"

"Your idea to run 'em aground in their own State?"

"Not necessary to go so far.  Run them across _this_ State line--then
catch them off guard in some of these canyons or arroyos.  Turn them over
to a sheriff who doesn't owe his bread and butter to Moyese.  He'll have
to hold them till Williams and MacDonald come down to testify.  By that
time, I fancy we'll hear from people who have been losing stock all the
way up from Arizona.  Moyese will be keeping mighty quiet."

"Meanwhile, Mr. White-vest, who planned all this deviltry--he goes free!
These are only the poor rowdy tools for--"

"For the Man Higher Up," finished Wayland.

"Wayland, who is this white-vested anarchist, this vested-righter who
subverts your laws?"

"His name is Legion, sir!  That's what's the matter!  These hide-bound
vested righters are only vested righters when the rights don't happen to
belong to some other man."  The Ranger related the incidents of the visit
to the Ridge.

The old man rode along in silence.

"And from what you say," finished Wayland, "he evidently didn't mean any
harm to come to the boy; but that is always the way with this cursed
system.  You're law breaking law-makers, your divine-right-king-crooks
out here--don't _plan_ crime.  They only plan to have their own way.
It's like a man breaking down a dam to get a little water.  When the
floods burst through the break, he thinks it isn't his fault."

"That's what some of our Scotch kings thought; we took their heads off
just the same."

"Well, if we can get our people wakened up, we'll take a few heads off,
too, at election time."  He touched his pony to a brisk trot across the
meadow, following the mule as it dodged in and out among the larches, up
over a saddle back and down again thwarting a long bare hollow.

Wayland saw the light come sifting in gold dust.  Somehow, the warmth of
it swept round him in a consciousness of that night on the Ridge.  It was
like the snow flakes she talked about, sculpturing the rocks, shaping
destiny.  Would the day ever come when they two could ride forth
adventuring happiness together?  The hammer of a woodpecker, the resinous
tang of the gold-dust air, the shaking of the evergreen needles like
gypsy tambourines--filled him with an absurd sense of the joy of life;
and he could never drink the joy of these things without thinking of her;
for the consciousness of her presence, of the warm glow of her love,
enveloped all now, permeated his being, a life inside his life, blended
of his own.

"A don't like the way that mule o' yours keeps lookin' ahead with both
ears, Wayland!  It's all-fired quiet here, for noon-hour when the streams
should be shouting.  There is something mighty queer and still in this
air.  Yon saucy woodpecker has quit drillin'!  Hold back a bit!  A'm
goin' ahead!  A've known these mountains longer than you have," and
curving through the brushwood, the old frontiersman came out ahead of the
pack leader.

The little mule had undoubtedly followed a kind of trail.  Though the
grasses were saddle-high, punky logs showed the fresh rip of shod horses.
Little mossy streams betrayed roiled water and stones over-turned.  Then,
the path emerged from the trees so abruptly you could have drawn a line
along the edge of the timber, out to a great hollowed slope, wind-blown,
bare of rocks, clear of trees as if levelled by a giant trowel; hushed,
preternaturally hushed, the Ranger thought as he came up abreast and
glanced to the top of the long slope where the snows glistened over the
edge of the rocks heavy and white.

"This is what we heard last night!  See, Wayland, the snow up there has
been breakin'!  It sags!  Got its fore feet forward for a race down one
of these days!"

Both men became aware of something portentous and heavy in the silence:
it was mid-day; but there was no noon-time shout of disimprisoned waters.
Not a crossbill, not a jay, neither eagle nor hawk, showed against the
azure fields of sky and snow.  A little riffle as of waiting fluttered
through the grasses and leaves.  Wayland was looking with dumb amazement
at the great field of laurel in bloom across the slope; three or four
miles of it, leaves of green wax in the sun, flowers passion pale,
motionless, waiting; what was it he missed?  The insect life; there were
neither butterflies nor bees rifling the fields of honey bloom; the
flowers, acres and acres of them, stood passion pale, motionless
waiting--waiting what?  Then, there was a singing in his ears, a weird
strange undertone to the hush of the forest behind them.  His breath came
heavy.  The old man was speaking in a muffled voice.

"See, boy, there are three men on the other side!  They are signalling."

Wayland came alive out of his strange trance.

"It isn't to us they are signalling.  Move back quick, out of sight, sir;
see! there's a man half way across, the fellow in the yellow slicker!
There's some one on foot holding him in his saddle!  What ever are they
waving so frantically for?"

Involuntarily, both men had wheeled the ponies back in the screen of
trees, when the old man cried out: "What in blazes ails your mule?"

The little animal had jumped sideways.

"Get back, quick! for God's sake, Wayland!  A know the signs from the
Canadian Rockies.  It isn't _us_ they are signalling.  It's the snow;
it's coming, Wayland!"

The words were smothered by a tremor grinding through the hollow hush.
There was a split, a splintering, a dull boom of titanic weight falling,
miles away.  They saw the puff of snow dust fly up in a toss of mist over
the face of the distant upper crags.  Then, a grinding tore the earth;
something white glistening viscous crumpled--coiled with untellable
furious speed, shaggy and formless, out from the upper peaks--coiled and
writhed out like a giant python in titanic torture.  For an instant, for
less than the fraction of an instant, it poised and coiled and looped as
a great white snake in and out among the far upper meadows: then ruptured
free with ear splitting wrench.  The air was ripped to tatters.  The
forest, the rock wall, the foundations of the universe gave way; the huge
hemlocks were tossing and bending like feathers; the upper forests
toppled and spilled like an inverted matchbox.  Then the whole world,
earth, air, rocks, forest, shot down in a blinding rush, in a viscous
torrent of titanic fury.  The surface of the mountain crumpled up and
peeled in a sliding mass.

Wayland came to himself hurled back a hundred feet knocked flat by an
invisible blow.  The old frontiersman lay clinging to a prone trunk
spitting blood and gasping for air.  The animals were scrambling to their
feet saddles twisted, bridles broken.

"'Twas the concussion of the air!  A'm not hurt, not a feather o' my head
hurt!  A've seen it before in the Rockies!  Look back," he panted.

When the Ranger turned, the clouds of dust were settling, though the
earth still rocked.  A hundred feet of snow lay across the trail in a
wall.  Huge trees had been torn from the roots, sucked in, twisted and
torted like straws.

"Look," reiterated the old frontiersman.

Against the rock trail on the other side of the snow slide, three men
stood waving frantically.  From the time the falling cornice of snow had
tossed up in a puff of smoke ten miles away to the fell stroke of the
titanic leveller of the ages--not ten seconds had passed.  It would have
been an even bet that the men on the other side had been caught in the
middle of their sentences, in the middle of their signalling.  As for the
injured man and his companion--Wayland looked down the mountain slope.
The snow slide had shot to the bottom and gone quarter way up the other
side.

"'Twill be safer now to cross to the other side!  We can go up above the
snow slide and cross by the bare rocks!"

But Wayland was unheeding.  What was it about snow flakes massing to a
momentum that bevelled the granite and rolled away the rocks for the
resurrection to a new life?  Would it be so some day with the Nation?
Would the quiet workers, the pure thinkers, the faithful citizens mass
some day to sweep away the lawlessness, the outrage, the crime, the
treachery, the trickery, the shame, the sham of self-government's
failures; to roll away the stone for the resurrection to a new Democracy?
'High brows,' 'dreamers,' 'ghost walkers,' 'barkers,' 'biters,'
'muck-rakers!'  Oh, he knew the choice names that lawless greed cast at
such as he; but a greater than he had said something about the meek and
the inheritance of the earth; and there lay the work of the snow flake
across the trail.

"I suppose," he remarked absently, "it's our duty to go down and dig
those dead duffers out."

"Nothing o' the kind.  They'll keep cold storage till the crack o' doom,
and after that 'tis an ice pack they'll need.  The snow's too clean a
grave for the likes o' them!  The Lord has hewn out a path through the
sea!  Sound the loud timbrel and on!"

CHAPTER XV

THE DESERT

Four days had passed since they stood on the edge of the snow slide and
gazed across at three outlaws on the far side under the crag waving
frantically where their belated comrades had been buried under the
avalanche.  When the outlaw drovers had turned and galloped into the
blue slashed gully of the opposite mountain, the Ranger had observed
that their only remaining pack horse was white, an old dappled white
running with a limp.

It had taken the better part of three days to cross above the wreckage
of snows and forest.  They had camped for two nights within a stone's
throw of the upper glaciers.  Wayland could see the reflection of the
stars in the ice at night, and count the layers of the century's
snow-fall that harked back, each layer a year's fall, to the eras
before Christ.

"The little snow flake has been on the job a long time," he said to the
old preacher.

Matthews didn't understand.  "Can't make out why it's so hot when we're
high up!"

"The wind is off the Desert," said Wayland.

"Mountains in a desert?"

"That's the same as asking if you ever have summer in Saskatchewan."

The frontiersman looked more puzzled than ever.

Wild longings to seize the day's joy came to the Ranger.  If the snow
flake typified law sculpturing the centuries, law was a process not of
a life time, not of a century, but aeons of centuries; and flesh,
spirit, humanity's brevity cried out for the trancing joys of the
present.  If law took billions of years to sculpture its purpose,
grinding down the transient lives in its way?--When Wayland came to
that _impasse_, he used to get off and walk.  He did not know, and it
was well he did not know, she was pacing her room two hundred miles
back on the other side of the Divide, praying that he might succeed in
one breath, that he might come back in another, and praying always that
they might both be strong.

Every mile was a mile deeper into the eternity of her love . . . he
knew that; but he also knew that the fulfilment of duty meant
renunciation.  Was it the cry of the flesh?  Wayland scoffed the
thought.  Flesh in the frontier West doesn't take the trouble to wear
fig-leaf signs.  It is blazoning, bold, unashamed, known for what it
is; but there is no confusion of values.  He who wills takes what he
wills and wears the mark.  Wayland had been long enough away from the
confused values of more civilized lands to know belladonna eyes from
starlight; and he knew what his being craved was not carrion.  It was
what harmonizes both flesh and spirit, and lifts the temporal to
eternity.  Eternity . . . he laughed again.  Eternity was too short;
and that was what renunciation meant, giving up a citadel against all
the harking cares and hells of hate in life.

Where they had picked up the fugitives' trail again on the fourth day
from the snow slide, the Ranger had taken stock of provisions.  We none
of us know just how long the Trail is to be when we set out.  Flour and
tea enough for a month's travel: of bacon and canned beans, only a
day's supply remained.

"Yes, on your life, forward, long as there's a mouthful left . . . push
on," Matthews had urged.

Wayland expostulated: "Do you know what Desert travel means?"

"No, an' care less!  If y' want to get anywhere, ye don't set out to
turn back!  Dante's inner circle was ice!  A've had that!  Now, A'll
take a nip of his outer circle and try your blue blazing Desert."

"It'll be blue all right, sir!  You'll know it when you come to it by
the shadows being blue instead of black."

And always, the trail had grown rockier, the forests more scattered,
the trees scantier and dwarfed, till the way led from clump to clump of
scrub pinon amid red buttes and sand hummocks.  And always, the valleys
widened and lifted to higher table lands, blasted and shrivelled and
tremulous of heat, till the mountains lay on the far sky-line silver
strips flecked with purple, like shores to an ocean of pure light.  And
always, it was the trail of fleeing horsemen they followed, with one
track running aside from the others picking the softest places.

"Only one pack horse and that lame," Wayland pointed to the foot
prints.  "That means they must have provisions cached some where on the
way.  If we can tire them out before they can reach their cache, we've
got 'em."

Once, where the way led between flanking foot hills, the tracks dipped
into a mountain stream and didn't come up on the other side.  "Hoh!"
commented the old man, "that's easy; you'll take the right and A'll
take the left; and where the hills lift up ahead, A'm thinking you'll
find the tracks plain."

All the same, Wayland noticed Matthews frequently moistening his
parched lips; and the lakes of light ahead lay a wavering looming veil.
A mile farther on, the ripped punk of a dead pinon betrayed the passing
of the fugitives.  When Wayland dismounted to examine the marks, he
stepped on a small cactus.  They picked up a trail that led over rocky
mesas and dipped suddenly into the deep dug-way of a dry gravel bed.
The sand walls of the dead stream afforded shelter from the sun, and
the two riders spurred their bronchos to a canter led by the pack mule.
The sand banks spread, widened, opened; and the mule stopped, both ears
pointing forward like a hunting dog.  They rode forward to find
themselves looking down on an ocean of light, shimmering orange colored
light, with the mountains trembling on the far sky line silver strips
necked by purple and opal.  The old frontiersman mowed the sweat from
his brows and gazed from under shade of his level hand.

"Sun's like a shower o' red hot arrows," he said.

The sand lay fine as sifted ashes dotted with clumps of bluish-green
sage brush and greasewood.  A bleached ox-skull focussed the light with
a glaze that stabbed vision.  The ashy earth, the dusty sage brush, the
orange sand hills, the silver strip on the far sky line flecked by the
purple and opal loomed and wavered and writhed in a white flame.

"Do you see the bluish shade to the shadows?" asked Wayland.

The old man was still shading his eyes from the white heat.  "Do A see
mountains, Wayland?"

"Certainly, you do!  Did you think the Desert flat as the sea?"

"That's just it!  If A see mountains, then A see water too!  It keeps
wavering."

"By which you may know _it isn't water_," warned Wayland.

"Wayland, A' don't believe you!"

He had dismounted as he spoke and proceeded down the yellow sands to a
pit at the foot of the rolling slope.  Wayland saw him halt, again
shade his eyes from the sun glare, and stoop.  On his knees, he looked
again and rose.  He came up the slope shaking his head.  "Y'd swear it
was water at y'r very feet till you bent down."

"Till you changed the angle of reflection . . . eh? and then the water
vanished, sir."

Both men had thrown their coats across the rear of the saddles.
Matthews now knotted a large handkerchief round his neck.  There was
not a cloud, nor the shadow of a cloud for shade.  It was a wilted,
shrivelled, heat-flayed, fire-blasted world of arid desolation;
trenched by the dry arroyos; sifted by the hot winds fine as flour;
with rings and belts and wavering layers of heat--heat from the orange
sun edged red by the Desert dust of the atmosphere--heat from the wind
off some white flamed furnace--heat from the ochre shifting sands
panting to the loom and writhe of the blue-flamed air, and over all a
veil, was it blue or lilac or lavender? tinted as of rainbow mists.
For a little while, neither spoke.  Each knew what the dusty dead
orange earth, the smoking sand hills, the sifted volcanic ash, the
burnt oil smell of shrivelled growth, meant to unprepared travellers.

"I wish, sir," said Wayland, "I wish you would turn back here and let
me go on alone; I really do!"

"What! turn tail like a whipped dog an' scuttle at first danger?  Go to
blazes, my boy!  Do you think y'r beasts will stand crossing before
sunset?"

"It's about as easy going ahead as standing still.  If we only had a
water canteen, it wouldn't be such a fool-thing to risk."

The wind flayed them with hot peppering sand.

"If we took time to go back for one now, this wind would wipe out the
tracks."

"What's yon splash o' dust goin' over the roll o' th' hill?"

Beyond the quiver of the dusky heat, they could see the drift of ash
dust eddying to the wind like dirty snow.

"I wish, sir, you would turn back here," urged Wayland; but Matthews
was not heeding.  He had gathered up the broncho's reins.

"Time to be moving," he said.  "'Tis my observation, Wayland, that the
devil gets away from the saint because, he'll always ride one faster.
Many's the time when A've been pressed in the old days, when if the man
behind had just ridden the one bit harder that he thought he couldn't,
just not sagged where he nagged, he'd ha' got me, Wayland!  When y'
pace two men, one ridin' with the devil behind him, and the other jog
trotting with a dumpy comfortable conscience, 'tis a safe bet which
will win."

There was the clitter clatter of the horses' hoofs over the lava rocks;
the padded beat of the easy plains lope as they left the lava for the
ashy silt; then no sound but the swash of saddle leather along trail
marks that cut the crusted silt like tracks in soft snow.  The wind had
been flaring a steady torrid white flame.  Now it began to come in
puffs and whirls that beat the air to dust of ashes and sent the sand
foaming in the wave lines of a yellow sea.  The mule no longer ambled
ahead with ears pointed.  He shuffled through the ash with dragging
steps; and the sage brush crackled brittle where the trail led out from
the silt across the baked earth.  The heat waves writhed and throbbed
through the atmosphere, a flame through a sieve, with a scorch of
burning from the ground and clouds of dust like smoke.

"I think I'll get off and walk," said Wayland, suiting the action to
the word.  "I hope those blackguards are counting on camping at a
spring to-night."

They plodded on for another half hour before Matthews answered.

"Do you think they did it intentionally?  A mean, do y' think they
lured us here to get rid of us?"

Wayland paused and thought.

"It's all the same whether they did or not . . . now!  What was it you
said about a man chased by the devil setting a good live pace?  They
have to find water.  They know where water is.  We don't!  Only safety
is to follow."

"Queer how y' keep imaginin' ye hear wimplin' brooks!  When A let
myself go, A keep hearin' the tinkle o' y'r rills back in the
mountains!  A keep seein' the blue false water waverin' up to my feet
an' recedin' again!  Isn't there a fellow in mythology, Wayland, died
o' thirst in water because when he reached to drink it, it kept
waverin' away?"

"That fellow had travelled in the Desert," answered Wayland.