Perch of the Devil

BY GERTRUDE ATHERTON
NEW YORK FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY PUBLISHERS
Copyright, 1914, by Frederick A. Stokes Company All rights reserved, including that of translation into foreign languages Fourth Printing
TO MR. FRANK J. EDWARDS AND MR. WILTON G. BROWN OF HELENA, MONTANA
PERCH OF THE DEVIL
PART I
“THE shining mountains,” said Gregory Compton softly, throwing back his head, his eyes travelling along the hard bright outlines above the high valley in which his ranch lay. “The shining mountains. That is what the Indians called them before the white man came.”
His wife yawned frankly. “Pity they don’t shine inside as well as out—what we’ve got of ’em.”
“Who knows? Who knows?”
“We don’t. That’s the trouble.”
“Old Man Compton,” who had stampeded from his small farm in northern New York in the sixties to meet with little success in the mines, but more as a rancher, had been as typical a hayseed as ever punctuated politics with tobacco juice in front of a corner grocery-store, but had promised his wife on her death-bed that their son should have “schooling.” Mrs. Compton, who had arrived in Montana soon after the log house was built, was a large, dark, silent woman, whom none of her distant neighbours had ever claimed to know. It was currently believed in the New York village whence she came that in the early days of the eighteenth century the sturdy Verrooy stock had been abruptly crossed by the tribe of the Oneida. Ancient history in a new country is necessarily enveloped in mist, but although the children she had lost had been fair and nondescript like their father, her youngest, and her only son, possessed certain characteristics of the higher type of Indian. He was tall and lightly built, graceful, supple, swift of foot, with the soft tread of the panther; and although his skin was no darker than that of the average brunette, it acquired significance from the intense blackness of his hair, the thin aquiline nose, the long, narrow eyes, the severe and stolid dignity of expression even in his earlier years.