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.