So having gone into temptation and not been tempted—which really was disappointing—I found I was not engaged to marry Miss Burrows. That was all right. I watered and fed Black Prince and Gentle Annie. Then gathering both blankets, my cloak and hardtack for my supper, I turned my back on Freak House, and put out for solitude. Rams and Miss Violet searched for me long and loud, but I wanted to be alone.
Only a few paces beyond the cabins, I came to an edge of space. Thousands of feet beneath lay an abyss of clouds. Near by on the left the Throne Glacier made its broken leap, a cataract of ice, while on my right the clouded gorge of Horsethief Creek, with murmur of distant waters, curved away toward the Columbia Valley. There I could see the faint lights of our camp, and as I watched, a thread of music, delicate as some blown thread of cobweb, bade me "Come home! Come home!"
It was last post.
It seemed so far away, that life, that service, up here among the snowdrifts and the rocks of frosty silver, which cut the swinging and eternal star-field. Here was a sanctuary for driven souls, where no pursuing evil dared to come near me. This glacier was surely the throne of our Eternal Father attended by mists of spirits, hosts of stars and presence invisible who, with a sighing, wind-like breath, prayed for His coming to judge, to save, to pardon.
I ate my hardtack with a curious sense that this bread was sacramental, lay wrapped in my cloak, awake in perfect rest, and at the dawn knelt watching for the sun, until the Rocky Mountains were molten at the edges with his blinding splendor.
II
Before the freaks were astir, I mounted Black Prince, told Gentle Annie to come along or starve, and set out riding in company with health, the god who lives outdoors. No wholesome lad of two-and-twenty, well armed and mounted, in the glamour of the daybreak, is ever so unhappy as he claims; but still the boys at the "Tough Nut" hailing me for breakfast, relieved a gnawing anxiety below my belts. A bird in the hand is better than a bull flying. And after breakfast, they would not let me go, which pleased me. I had a day to spare. I learned also that frontiersmen of many tribes and trades are all one brotherhood—of fools.
"Of course," as Long Shorty told me after breakfast, "poor Loco doesn't count. He doesn't belong to our ancient Order of Fools, who follow the tracks of wandering St. Paul. Bobbie, it's your wash-up, so get a move on. Bobbie and I take turns at muddling things."
The prospector coiled his legs on the door-step, and lighted his corn-cob pipe. "We look down," said he, "on those old Spanish miners with their dinky ladders, buckets instead of pumps, and mule Arastras. That's the way Loco jeers at our fissure veins.
"He has a pair of rotary fans, which get up a cyclone between them, and the dust in that cyclone will tear a steel crowbar to pieces, yes, to dust of steel. Rock shatters to dust before it has time to drop through.