It wasn't a large city; but there was certainly lack of any suggestion of the frontier. But there were a number of things that Dan Failing did not know about the West. One of the most important of them was the curious way in which wildernesses and busy cities are sometimes mixed up indiscriminately together, and how one can step out of a modern country club to hear the coyotes wailing on the hills. He really had no right to feel disappointed. He had simply come to the real West—that bewildering land in which To-morrow and Yesterday sit right next to each other, with no To-day between. The cities, often built on the dreams of the future, sometimes are modern to such a point that they give many a sophisticated Eastern man a decided shock. But quite often this quality extends to the corporation limits and not a step further. Then, likely as not, they drop sheer off, as over a precipice, into the utter wildness of the Past.
Dan looked up to the hills, and he felt better. He couldn't see them plainly. The faint smoke of a distant forest fire half obscured them. Yet he saw fold on fold of ridges of a rather peculiar blue in color, and even his untrained eyes could see that they were clothed in forests of evergreen. It is a strange thing about evergreen forests that they never, even when one is close to them, appear to be really green. To a distant eye, they range all the way from lavender to a pale sort of blue for which no name has ever been invented. Just before dark, when, as all mountaineers know, the sky turns green, the forests are simply curious, dusky shadows. The pines are always dark. Perhaps, after all, they are simply the symbol of the wilderness,—eternal, silent, and in a vague way rather dark and sad. No one who really knows the mountains can completely get away from their tone of sadness. Over the heads of the green hills Dan could see a few great peaks; McLaughlin, even and regular as a painted mountain; Wagner, with queer white gashes where the snow still lay in its ravines, and to the southeast the misty range of snow-covered hills that were the Siskeyous. He felt decidedly better. And when he saw old Silas Lennox waiting patiently beside the station, he felt he had come to the right place.
It would be interesting to explain why Dan at once recognized the older man for the breed he was. But unfortunately, there are certain of the many voices that speak within the minds of human beings of which scientists have never been able to take phonographic records. They simply whisper their messages, and their hearer, without knowing why, knows that he has heard the truth. Silas Lennox was not dressed in a way that would distinguish him. It was true that he wore a flannel shirt, riding trousers, and rather heavy, leathern boots. But sportsmen all over the face of the earth wear this costume at sundry times. Mountain men have a peculiar stride by which experienced persons can occasionally recognize them; but Silas Lennox was standing still when Dan got his first glimpse of him. The case resolves itself into a simple matter of the things that could be read in Lennox's face.
Dan disbelieved wholly in a book that told how to read characters at sight. Yet at the first glance of the lean, bronzed face his heart gave a curious little bound. A pair of gray eyes met his,—two fine black points in a rather hard gray iris. They didn't look past him, or at either side of him, or at his chin or his forehead. They looked right at his own eyes. The skin around the eyes was burned brown by the sun, and the flesh was so lean that the cheek bones showed plainly. The mouth was straight; but yet it was neither savage nor cruel. It was simply determined.
But the strangest part of all was that Dan felt an actual sense of familiarity with this kind of man. To his knowledge, he had never known one before; and it was extremely doubtful if, in his middle-western city, he had even seen the type. In spite of the fact that he thinks nothing of starting out thirty miles across the snow on snowshoes, the mountain man cannot be called an extensive traveler. He plans to go to some great city once in a lifetime and dreams about it of nights, but rather often the Death that is every one's next-door neighbor in the wilderness comes in and cheats him out of the trip. Few of the breed had ever come to Gitcheapolis. Yet all his life, Dan felt, he had known this straight, gray-eyed mountain breed even better than he knew the boys that went to college with him. At the time he didn't stop to wonder at the feeling. He was too busy looking about. But the time was to come when he would wonder and conclude that it was just another bit of evidence pointing to the same conclusion. And besides this unexplainable feeling of familiarity, he felt a sudden sense of peace, even a quiet sort of exultation, such as a man feels when he gets back into his own home country at last.
Lennox came up with a light, silent tread and extended his hand. "You're Dan Failing's grandson, aren't you?" he asked. "I'm Silas Lennox, who used to know him when he lived on the Divide. You are coming to spend the summer and fall on my ranch."
The immediate result of these words, besides relief, was to set Dan wondering how the old mountaineer had recognized him. He wondered if he had any physical resemblance to his grandfather. But this hope was shot to earth at once. His telegram had explained about his malady, and of course the mountaineer had picked him out simply because he had the mark of the disease on his face. As he shook hands, he tried his best to read the mountaineer's expression. It was all too plain: an undeniable look of disappointment.
The truth was that even in spite of all the Chamber of Commerce head had told him, Lennox had still hoped to find some image of the elder Dan Failing in the face and body of his grandson. But at first there seemed to be none at all. The great hunter and trapper who had tamed the wilderness about the region of the Divide—as far as mortal man could tame it—had a skin that was rather the color of old leather. The face of this young man was wholly without tinge of color. Because of the thick glasses, Lennox could not see the young man's eyes; but he didn't think it likely they were at all like the eyes with which the elder Failing saw his way through the wilderness at night. Of course he was tall, just as the famous frontiersman had been, but while the elder weighed one hundred and ninety pounds, bone and muscle, this man did not touch one hundred and thirty. Evidently the years had brought degeneracy to the Failing clan. Lennox was desolated by the thought.
He helped Dan with his bag to a little wiry automobile that waited beside the station. They got into the two front seats.
"You'll be wondering at my taking you in a car—clear to the Divide," Lennox explained. "But we mountain men can't afford to drive horses any more where a car will go. This time of year I can make it fairly easy—only about fifteen miles on low gear. But in the winter—it's either a case of coming down on snowshoes or staying there."