On the backward trail he turned aside to stamp out a smoking log beside a deserted camp-fire, and again he made a detour into a lovely little park to visit a fisherman and to warn him of the danger of fire. He was the forest guardian, alert to every sign, and yet all the time he was being drawn on toward his temptation. Why not resign and go East, taking the girl with him? “After all, the life up here is a lonely and hard one, in no sense a vocation for an ambitious man. Suppose I am promoted to Forest Supervisor? That only means a little more salary and life in a small city rather than here. District Supervisor would be better, but can I hope to secure such a position?”
Up to this month he had taken the matter of his promotion easily; it was something to come along in the natural course of things. “There is no haste; I can wait.” Now haste seemed imperative. “I am no longer so young as I was,” he admitted.
Once back at his cabin he laid aside his less tangible problems, and set himself to cooking some food to take back with him to the peak. He brought in his pack-horse, and burdened him with camp outfit and utensils, and extra clothing. He filled his pockets with such medicines as he possessed, and so at last, just as night was falling, he started back over his difficult trail.
The sky was black as the roof of a cavern, for the stars were hid by a roof of cloud which hung just above his head, and the ranger was obliged to feel his way through the first quarter of his journey. The world grew lighter after he left the canon and entered the dead timber of the glacial valley, but even in the open the going was wearisome and the horses proceeded with sullen caution.
“The Basque is a poor, worthless little peasant, but he is a human being, and to leave him to die up there would be monstrous,” he insisted, as the horses stumbled upward over the rocks of a vast lateral moraine toward the summit, blinded by the clouds through which they were forced to pass. He was dismounted now and picking his way with a small lantern, whose feeble ray (like that of a firefly) illuminated for a small space the dripping rocks; all else was tangible yellow mist which possessed a sulphurous odor and clung to everything it touched. The wind had died out entirely, and the mountain-side was as silent as the moon.
Foot by foot he struggled up the slope, hoping each moment to break through this blanket of vapor into the clear air. He knew from many previous experiences that the open sky existed a little way above, that this was but a roof.
At last he parted the layer of mist and burst into the moonlit heights above. He drew a deep breath of awe as he turned and looked about him. Overhead the sky was sparkling with innumerable stars, and the crescent moon was shining like burnished silver, while level with his breast rolled a limitless, silent, and mystical ocean of cloud which broke against the dark peaks in soundless surf, and spread away to the east in ever-widening shimmer. All the lesser hills were covered; only the lords of the range towered above the flood in sullen and unmoved majesty.
For a long time Cavanagh stood beside his weary horses, filling his soul with the beauty of this world, so familiar yet so transformed. He wished for his love; she would feel and know and rejoice with him. It was such experiences as these that made him content with his work. For the ranger Nature plays her profoundest dramas—sometimes with the rush of winds, the crash of thunder; sometimes like this, in silence so deep that the act of breathing seems a harsh, discordant note.
Slowly the mystic waters fell away, sinking with slightly rolling action into the valleys, and out of the wool-white waves sudden sharp dark forms upthrust like strange masters of the deep. Towers took shape and islands upheaved, crowned with dark fortresses. To the west a vast and inky-black Gibraltar magically appeared. Soon the sea was but a prodigious river flowing within the high walls of an ancient glacier, a ghost of the icy stream that once ground its slow way between these iron cliffs.
With a shudder of awe the ranger turned from the intolerable beauty of this combination of night, cloud, and mountain-crest, and resumed his climb. Such scenes, by their majesty, their swift impermanency, their colossal and heedless haste, made his heart ache with indefinable regret. Again and again he looked back, longing for some power which would enable him to record and reproduce for the eyes of his love some part of this stupendous and noiseless epic. He was no longer content to enjoy Nature’s splendors alone.