The Freebooters of the Wilderness Part 20

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 G.o.d'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 t.i.tanic 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, s.h.a.ggy and formless, out from the upper peaks--coiled and writhed out like a giant python in t.i.tanic 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 t.i.tanic fury. The surface of the mountain crumpled up and peeled in a sliding ma.s.s.

Wayland came to himself hurled back a hundred feet knocked flat by an invisible blow. The old frontiersman lay clinging to a p.r.o.ne 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 t.i.tanic leveller of the ages--not ten seconds had pa.s.sed. 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 ma.s.sing 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 ma.s.s 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 pa.s.sed 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 _impa.s.se_, 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 h.e.l.ls 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 b.u.t.tes 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 sh.o.r.es to an ocean of pure light. And always, it was the trail of fleeing hors.e.m.e.n 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 pa.s.sing 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.