Part 44

Again he rose above it, to find it a fantastic sea lit by the sun, and glowing with pink and gold and violet. Celestial in its ethereal beauty, it threw into still more appalling shadow the smoking altar of passion toward which he spurred. From moment to moment the surface rose and shifted in swift, tumultuous, yet soundless waves, breaking round pine-clad promontories in shimmering breakers, faint, and far, and serene.

Down through a deep canon to the south a prodigious river of mist was rushing, a silent cataract of ashy vapor plunging to a soundless beach. Above and beyond it the high peaks shone in radiance so pure that the heart of the lover ached with the pain of its evanescent beauty. It was as if he were looking across a foaming flood upon the stupendous and shining park of some imperial potentate whose ornate and splendid country home lay just beyond. Rocky spires rose like cathedral towers, and fortresses abutted upon the stream. And yet in the midst of that glorified plain the smoke of the burning rose.

Slowly he led his horse along the mountain-side, grasping with eager desire at every changing aspect of this marvellous scene. It was infinitely more gorgeous, more compelling, than his moonlight experience the night before, for here reality, definite and powerful, was interfused with mystery. These foot-hills, hitherto pleasantly precipitous, had suddenly become grandiose. All was made over upon a mightier scale, each rock and tree being distorted by the passing translucent clouds into a kind of monstrous yet epic proportion.

Ghostly white ledges broke from the darker mist like fields of distant crusted snow. Castellated crags loomed from the mystic river like fortified islands. Cattle, silent, enormously aggrandized, emerged like fabled beasts of the eld, and stared upon him, their jaws dripping with dew. Bulls roared from the obscure deeps. Dead trees, with stark and sinister arms, menaced warningly. All was as unreal as the world of pain's delirium, and yet was as beautiful as the poet's vision; and the ranger, feeling that he was looking upon one of Nature's rarest displays, removed his hat in worship of it, thrilling with pride and satisfaction over the thought that this was his domain, his to guard and preserve.

The crowning glow of mystery and grace came as he led his horse out upon a projecting point of rocky ledge to rest. Here the cliff descended abruptly to an enormous depth, and upon the vaporous rolling flood beneath him a dome of darker shadow rested. At the summit of this shadow an aureole of rainbow light, a complete and glorious circle rested, in the midst of which his own image was flung, grotesque and gigantic.

"The Shadows of the Brocken!" he exclaimed, in ecstasy, all his bitterness, his care, forgotten. "Now I understand Goethe's lines." In all his life in the hills he had never before witnessed such a combination of peak and sun and cloud and shadow.

His love for the range came back upon him with such power that tears misted his eyes and his throat ached. "Where else will I find such scenes as this?" he asked himself. "Where in all the lowlands could such splendors shine? How can I leave this high world in which these wonders come and go? I will not! Here will I bring my bride and build my home. This is my world."

But the mist grew gray, the aureole of fire faded, the sun went down behind the hills, and the chill of evening deepened on the trail, and as he reapproached the scene of man's inhumanity to man the thought of camping there beside those charred limbs called for heroic resolution. He was hungry, too, and as the air pinched, he shivered.

"At the best, the sheriff cannot reach here before midnight," he said, and settled down to his unsought, revolting vigil.

His one relief lay in the mental composition of a long letter to Lee Virginia, whose life at that moment was a comfort to him. "If such purity, such sweetness, can come from violence and vulgarity, then surely a new and splendid State can rise even out of the ashes of these murdered men. Perhaps this is the end of the old," he mused, "perhaps this is the beginning of the new," and as he pondered the last faint crimson died out of the west. "So must the hate and violence die out of America," he said, "leaving the clear, sweet air of liberty behind."

He was near to the poet at the moment, for he was also the lover. His allegiance to the great republic stood the test. His faith in democracy was shaken, but not destroyed. "I will wait," he decided. "This shall be the sign. If this deed goes unavenged, then will I put off my badge and my uniform, and go back to the land where for a hundred years at least such deeds as these have been impossible."

He built a fire, as night fell, to serve both as beacon and as a defence against the cold. He felt himself weirdly remote in this vigil. From his far height he looked abroad upon the tumbled plain as if upon an ocean dimly perceptible yet august. "At this moment," he said, "curious and perhaps guilty eyes are wondering what my spark of firelight may mean."

His mind went again and again to that tall old man in the ditch. What was the meaning of his scared and sorrowful glance? Why should one so peacefully employed at such a time and in such a place wear the look of a hunted deer? What meant the tremor in his voice?

Was it possible that one so gentle should have taken part in this deed? "Preposterous suspicion, and yet he had a guilty look."

He was not a believer in ghosts, but he came nearer to a fear of the dark that night than ever before in his life. He brought his horse close to the fire for company, and was careful not to turn his back upon the dead. A corpse lying peacefully would not have produced this overpowering horror. He had seen battle-fields, but this pile of mangled limbs conquered even the hardened campaigner. He shivered each time his memory went back to what he had first looked upon--the charred hand, the helpless heel.

From his high hill of meditation he reviewed the history of the West. Based in bloody wars between the primitive races, and between the trappers and their allies, the land had passed through a thin adumbration of civilization as the stockmen drove out the buffalo and their hunters. Vigilantes, sheriff's posses (and now and again the regular army) had swept over these grassy swells on errands of retributory violence, and so the territory had been divided at last into populous States. Then politics, the great national game, had made of them a power, with Senators to represent a mere handful of miners and herdsmen. In the Congress of the United States these commonwealths had played their unscrupulous games, trading for this and for that local appropriation. Happily in some instances these Senators had been higher than their State, but in other cases they represented only too loyally the violent and conscienceless cow-man or lumber king, and now, as Redfield had said, the land-boomer was to have his term. The man who valued residents, not Wild West performers, was about to govern and despoil; this promoter, almost as selfish as the cattle king, was about to advance the State along the lines of his conception of civilization; and so, perhaps, this monstrous deed, this final inexcusable inhuman offence against law and humanity, was to stand as a monument dividing the old from the new. Such, at least, was the ranger's hope.

At last, far in the night, he heard the snort of a horse and the sound of voices. The law (such as it was) was creeping up the mountain-side in the person of the sheriff of Chauvenet County, and was about to relieve the ranger from his painful responsibility as guardian of the dead.

At last he came, this officer of the law, attended (like a Cheyenne chief) by a dozen lesser warriors of various conditions and kinds, but among them--indeed, second only to the sheriff--was Hugh Redfield, the Forest Supervisor, hot and eager with haste.

As they rode up to the fire, the officer called out: "Howdy, ranger! How about it?"

Ross stated briefly, succinctly, what he had discovered; and as he talked other riders came up the hill and gathered closely around to listen in wordless silence--in guilty silence, the ranger could not help believing.

The sheriff, himself a cattle-man, heard Cavanagh without comment till he had ended with a gesture. "And there they are; I turn them over to you with vast relief. I am anxious to go back to my own peaceful world, where such things do not happen."

The sheriff removed his hat and wiped his brow, then swore with a mutter of awe. "Well, by God, this is the limit! You say there were three bodies?"

"I lacked the courage to sort them out. I've been in battle, Mr. Sheriff, and I've seen dead men tumbled in all shapes, but someway this took the stiffening out of my knees. I rode away and left them. I don't care to see them again. My part of this work is done."

Redfield spoke. "Sheriff Van Horne, you and I have been running cattle in this country for nearly thirty years, and we've witnessed all kinds of shooting and several kinds of hanging, but when it comes to chopping and burning men, I get off. I shall personally offer a reward of a thousand dollars for the apprehension of these miscreants, and I hope you'll make it your solemn duty to hunt them to earth."

"You won't have far to go," remarked Ross, significantly.

"What do you mean?" asked the sheriff.

"I mean this slaughter, like the others that have taken place, was the work of cattle-men who claim this range. Their names are known to us all."

"Can it be possible!" exclaimed Redfield, looking round at the silent throng, and in the wavering light certain eyes seemed to shift and fall.