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.