A WORLD of smiling hope looked out of the man’s tired blue eyes. The sky was brilliant, and flecked with fine-weather cloud. The air was full of a warmth that was increasing with each passing day. The whole world about him was bursting with renewed life. He felt that the battle had been fought out. At long last the prospect of ultimate victory was infinitely more than a vain hope.
His face and body were painfully thin. But the full ravages, induced by the privations he had suffered during the desperate months of winter, were largely concealed under a thick growth of grey beard and whisker. His hair was long, with scarcely a streak of its original colour remaining. And its white strands reached to the decayed collar of a coat that would have ill-become the body of a “hoboe.” His nether garments were worn and patched, and painfully soil-stained. But his thin body was unbowed, and the spirit looking out of his eyes was undismayed.
Near by his horse, in little better shape than himself, was hungrily devouring the new-born shoots of sweet grass. Its long winter coat was heavily matted and mud-discoloured. There were the disfiguring scars of saddle-galls about its withers and under its forelegs. And its whole condition was illuminating as to the part the wretched creature had played in the desperate battle for existence which they had fought out together.
Just behind the man, in a shelter of a pinewood bluff, stood a crazy habitation. It was a patched ruin which must have been set up many years ago by some other wanderer seeking hiding within the mountain world. It was log-built and box-like, without windows or smoke-stack. It was just a shelter against the storms of winter, with sufficient space in its hovel-like interior to admit of accommodation for horse as well as man. A small fire was spluttering before the doorway, and a cooking-pot stood steaming over it.
The man had reached that condition of endurance when bodily comfort no longer concerned him. The smiling sun, the warm rains that had swept the snows of winter from the face of an earth that was lusting to produce, the stirring life that was in full evidence about him—these were the things which preoccupied him, to the exclusion of everything, and afforded him an answer to the question that had dogged his every thought for months.
Jim Pryse had christened his hiding-place the Valley of Hope. And, in the weary months he had spent within its shelter, he had buoyed himself by planning a dream world within its bosom—a whimsical, fantastic world that satisfied a quiet sense of humour that never wholly deserted him.
But this had been at a time when he knew not from day to day the fate that was in store for him. This had been when storm and blizzard buried the world about him feet deep in snow, when the depths below zero ate into his bones, and such fire as he possessed was insufficient to thaw the frost rime that whitened the whole interior of his quarters.
Now his dream had become a real, vital purpose to him. Now it was altogether different. Now the great gateway of the valley stood wide open in the brilliant spring sunlight, and revealed the wonder of the world within. It was a glorious, fertile plain of sweet grass, that reached so far out towards the warming south that its confines lay beyond the reach of human eyes.
It was a radiant picture, alive with a busy, fussing, mating, feathered concourse. It was dotted with woodland bluffs of spruce, and pine, and poplar, and tamarack, and a wealth of undergrowth already bursting into full leaf. There were wide pools of snow-water standing in the troughs which lay between the rollers of new-born grass, a happy feeding and playing ground for the swarming geese and mallard. Splitting it down the centre, winding a crazy course over the line of least resistance, a surging mountain torrent tore joyously at its muddied banks in a mad desire to release its flooding waters. East and west the limits of the valley were frowning with dark forest-belts that came down from the mountain slopes. Southward the gateway revealed nothing but a broad, sunlit highway.
The gateway itself was marked by two sheer cliffs, black with the weathering of ages. Standing half a mile apart, and rising to immense heights, they embraced between them a spread of dense forest, which, in turn, concealed the cascading torrent whose source was the world of eternal snow above. The meaning of the gateway was simple of explanation. Beyond a doubt the great cliffs were all that remained of a saddle of hill, linking twin mountains, which had ultimately yielded to the fierce erosion to which the melting snows had subjected it.