The journey was nearing its end. For two hours or more Blanche and Lightning had been riding the wilderness of forest, and hill, and valley, since leaving the dark precincts of Nature’s secret postern.
It was a world whose might was nothing new with which to impress the mind of Lightning. The hills were, perhaps, more sublime in their magnificence; the forests were, perhaps, more deep and dark than those amongst which his life was passed. The towering crests, spread with the sweep of eternal glaciers, affected him no more than did the sparse grass under his horse’s hoofs, and the beds of treacherous tundra which had to be so carefully avoided. He was preoccupied to the exclusion of everything in Nature. One thought, one purpose, alone actuated him. Blindly he was permitting himself to be led to the only goal desired. Somewhere in these hills Molly was lying sick, possibly to death, and the woman beside him was conducting him to the haven with which her friends had provided her.
They were moving up an incline which mounted to a saddle between two lesser hills. There were great sweeps of forest on either hand, and with a break between them of barren, rocky highway that was without a vestige of vegetation. Away to the right, far across a valley, a mountain reared its head, and plunged it deep into the heart of the summer cloudbanks. To the left of them lay the upward sweep of forest, which only terminated where the snow-line cut it off.
“We’ve come more’n fifteen miles since we quit the headwaters,” Lighting said, in his ungracious fashion. “How much farther?”
Blanche turned at the sound of his voice. She smiled as she took in the hawk-like profile of the man. She realised his intensity of feeling. She warned herself of the trust he had placed in her. And she forgot completely his ungraciousness, and remembered only that phrase with which he greeted her: “I want that pore sick kid.”
“You’ll see the camp from the ‘saddle,’” she said quietly, raising an arm and pointing ahead. “It’s right below the Gateway.”
“The Gateway?”
The old man was staring round at her.
Blanche nodded. Her smile had deepened, but it elicited not a shadow of any responsive smile.
“Yes. The Gateway of Hope,” she said. “It’s a wide-open Gateway, that’s never closed to those in trouble—simple human trouble. And beyond it is shelter, and help, and—peace. Molly’s in trouble, and—she’s passed in through that Gateway.”