"As one watches it is not difficult to fancy that away back in the immemorial and unrecorded past, the Angel of Love bewailed the fact that mortals were to be given existence in a spot so forbidding, a spot that apparently was never to be warmed with God's smile, which was never to make a sign through which God's mercy was to be discerned; that then Omnipotence was touched, that with His hand He smote the hills and started the great river in its flow; that with His finger He traced out the channel across the corpse of that other river that had been fire, mingled the sunbeams with the raging waters and made it possible in that fire-blasted frame of scoria to swing a picture which should be, first to the red man and later to the pale races, a certain sign of the existence, the power and the unapproachable splendor of the Great First Cause.
"And as the red man through the centuries watched the spectacle, comprehending nothing except that an infinite voice was smiting his ears, and insufferable glories were blazing before his eyes; so through the centuries to come the pale races will stand upon the shuddering shore and watch, experiencing a mighty impulse to put off the sandals from their feet, under an overmastering consciousness that the spot on which they are standing is holy ground.
"There is nothing elsewhere like it; nothing half so weird, so wild, so beautiful, so clothed in majesty, so draped with terror; nothing else that awakens impressions at once so startling, so winsome, so profound. While journeying through the desert to come suddenly upon it, the spectacle gives one something of the emotions that would be experienced to behold a resurrection from the dead. In the midst of what seems like a dead world, suddenly there springs into irrepressible life something so marvelous, so grand, so caparisoned with loveliness and irresistible might, that the head is bowed, the strained heart throbs tumultuously and the awed soul sinks to its knees."
The whistles had sounded while Strong was speaking, and as he finished the good nights were spoken and the lights put out.
CHAPTER XII.
With the lighting of the pipes one evening, the conversation of the Club turned upon what constituted courage and a high sense of honor; whether they were native or acquired gifts. A good deal of talk ensued, until at last Wright's opinion was asked:
"You are all right," said he, "and all wrong. Some men are born insensible to fear, and some have a high sense of honor through instinct. But this, I take it, is not the rule and comes, I think, mostly as an hereditary gift, through long generations of proud ancestors. In my judgment, no gift to mortals is as noble as a lofty, honest pride. I do not mean that spurious article which we see so much of, but the pride which will not permit a man or woman to have an unworthy thought, because of the sense of degradation which it brings to the breast that entertains it. This, I believe, is more common in women than in men, and I suppose that it was this divine trait, manifesting itself in a brutal age, which gave birth to the chivalry of the Middle Ages.
"I have known a few men who, I believe, were born without the instinct of fear. Charley Fairfax was one of these. He was a dead shot with a pistol. He had some words with a man one day on the street in Sacramento, and the man being very threatening, Fairfax drew and cocked his Derringer. At the same moment the man drove the blade of a sword cane through one of the lungs of Fairfax, making a wound which eventually proved fatal. Fairfax raised his Derringer and took a quick aim at the heart of the murderer, but suddenly dropped the weapon and said: 'You have killed me, but you have a wife and children; for their sakes I give you your life,' and sank fainting and, as he thought, dying, into the arms of a friend who caught him as he was falling.
"There are other men as generous as Fairfax was, but to do what he did, when smarting under a fatal wound, requires the coolness and the nerve of absolute self-possession.