The vessel passed out of the shadow of the canyon, and the welcome shade gave place to the blazing heat of full sunlight. The sky was without a cloud except for the overhanging smoke patch. The great hills had suddenly leapt back and the world had become radiant with a hundred verdant hues, and the soft purple of the distance.
It was the arena of the Fire Hills. They stood up in the heart of it, three of them. Three comparatively low, expansive hummocks dwarfed by the tremendous altitude of the surrounding mountain ring. Standing widely separated on the low flat, about which the shrunken summer river skirted, they stood ominous, black and smoking. They were bare to the basaltic rock which was their whole structure, burnt black by the centuries of fire contained within their troubled hearts. They were stark, hideous, like malevolent dwarfs, monstrous and threatening, frowning down upon a world made gracious the year round by reason of their own involuntary beneficence.
The man removed his pipe from between his lips and inclined his head in the direction of the smoking hills.
“An hour more,” he said.
Sate’s reply came without glancing round.
“Yes,” he said.
His eyes, too, were on the three hills. It would have been impossible for it to have been otherwise. Their great ugly shoulders rose high above the belt of forest trees which lined the left bank of the river, and the smoke cloud hung heavily over the summits, till their appearance was like that of giant mushrooms. The smoke was motionless, dense, threatening.
“It’s thick,” the father observed reflectively. “We need a wind to carry it away. If the weather changes it’ll come down in a fog. They’re queer—those hills. Someday they’ll—”
The sharp crack of a rifle rang out. The man in the prow of the vessel jerked forward in the act of dipping his paddle, and sprawled with his body lolling over the vessel’s side.
The man with the yellow eyes scrambled to his feet and Sate sat up. For one tense moment every eye was turned upon the belt of trees that lined the shore masking the base of the Fire Hills. The shot had come from that direction, but there was nothing, no sign of any sort to give a clue to the whereabouts of the man who had fired with such murderous accuracy.