"Pioneers," I said. "Came out here before ever Seattle was founded. Homesteaded down at Puyallup or somewhere, about the same time as Ezra Meeker. It seems to me—"
"Well?" queried Milton Rhodes after some moments, during which I tried my level best to recollect the particulars of a certain wild, gloomy story of mystery and death and horror that I had heard long years before—in my boyhood days, in fact.
"I can not recollect it," I told him. "I didn't understand it even when I heard the man, an old acquaintance of the Scrantons, tell the story—a story of some black fate, some curse that had fallen upon the family."
"So that's the kind of mystery it is! From what the man said, though that was vague, shadowy, I thought that it was something very different. I thought that it was scientific."
"Maybe it is. We are speculating, you know, if one may call it that, on pretty flimsy data. One thing: I distinctly remember that Rainier had something to do with it."
"What Rainier?"
"Why, Mount Rainier."
"This is becoming intriguing," said Milton Rhodes, "if it isn't anything else. You spoke of a black fate, a curse: what has noble Old He, as the old mountain-men called Rainier, to do with such insignificant matters as the destinies of us insects called humans?"
"According to the old fellow I mentioned, that old acquaintance of the Scrantons, it was there, on Rainier, that this dark and mysterious business started."
"What was it that started?"