This is one of the stories that Alan had from the Basket Woman after she came to understand that the boy really loved her tales and believed them. She would sit by the spring with her hands clasped across her knees while the clothes boiled and Alan fed the fire with broken brush, and tell him wonder stories as long as the time allowed, which was never so long as the boy liked to hear them. The story of the Fire Bringer gave him the greatest delight, and he made a game of it to play with little Indian boys from the campoodie who sometimes strayed in the direction of the homesteader's cabin. It was the story that came oftenest to his mind when he lay in his bed at night, and saw the stars in the windy sky shine through the cabin window.
He heard of it so often and thought of it so much that at last it seemed to him that he hadbeen part of the story himself, but his mother said he must have dreamed it. The experience came to him in this way: He had gone with his father to the mountains for a load of wood, a two days' journey from home, and they had taken their blankets to sleep upon the ground, which was the first time of Alan's doing so. It was the time of year when white gilias, which the children call "evening snow," were in bloom, and their musky scent was mingled with the warm air in the soft dark all about him.
He heard the camp-fire snap and whisper, and saw the flicker of it brighten and die on the lower branches of the pines. He looked up and saw the stars in the deep velvet void, and now and then one fell from it, trailing all across the sky. Small winds moved in the tops of the sage and trod lightly in the dark, blossomy grass. Near by them ran a flooding creek, the sound of it among the stones like low-toned, cheerful talk. Familiar voices seemed to rise through it and approach distinctness. The boy lay in his blanket harking to one recurring note, until quite suddenly it separated itself from the babble and called to him in the Basket Woman's voice. He was sure it was she who spoke his name, though he could not see her; and got up on his feet at once. He knew, too, that he was Alan, and yet it seemed, without seeming strange, that he was the boy of the story who was afterward to be called the Fire Bringer. The skin of his body was dark and shining, with straight, black locks cropped at his shoulders, and he wore no clothing but a scrap of deerskin belted with a wisp of bark. He ran free on the mesa and mountain where he would, and carried in his hand a cleft stick that had a longish rounded stone caught in the cleft and held by strips of skin. By this he knew he had waked up into the time of which the Basket Woman had told him, before fire was brought to the tribes, when men and beasts talked together with understanding, and the Coyote was the Friend and Counselor of man. They ranged together by wood and open swale, the boy who was to be called Fire Bringer and the keen,gray dog of the wilderness, and saw the tribesmen catching fish in the creeks with their hands and the women digging roots with sharp stones. This they did in summer and fared well, but when winter came they ran nakedly in the snow or huddled in caves of the rocks and were very miserable. When the boy saw this he was very unhappy, and brooded over it until the Coyote noticed it.
"It is because my people suffer and have no way to escape the cold," said the boy.
"I do not feel it," said the Coyote.
"That is because of your coat of good fur, which my people have not, except they take it in the chase, and it is hard to come by."
"Let them run about, then," said the Counselor, "and keep warm."
"They run till they are weary," said the boy, "and there are the young children and the very old. Is there no way for them?"
"Come," said the Coyote, "let us go to the hunt."
"I will hunt no more," the boy answered him, "until I have found a way to save mypeople from the cold. Help me, O Counselor!"
But the Coyote had run away. After a time he came back and found the boy still troubled in his mind.
"There is a way, O Man Friend," said the Coyote, "and you and I must take it together, but it is very hard."
"I will not fail of my part," said the boy.
"We will need a hundred men and women, strong and swift runners."
"I will find them," the boy insisted, "only tell me."
"We must go," said the Coyote, "to the Burning Mountain by the Big Water and bring fire to your people."
Said the boy, "What is fire?"
Then the Coyote considered a long time how he should tell the boy what fire is. "It is," said he, "red like a flower, yet it is no flower; neither is it a beast, though it runs in the grass and rages in the wood and devours all. It is very fierce and hurtful and stays not for asking, yet if it is kept among stones and fed withsmall sticks, it will serve the people well and keep them warm."
"How is it to be come at?"
"It has its lair in the Burning Mountain, and the Fire Spirits guard it night and day. It is a hundred days' journey from this place, and because of the jealousy of the Fire Spirits no man dare go near it. But I, because all beasts are known to fear it much, may approach it without hurt and, it may be, bring you a brand from the burning. Then you must have strong runners for every one of the hundred days to bring it safely home."
"I will go and get them," said the boy; but it was not so easily done as said. Many there were who were slothful and many were afraid, but the most disbelieved it wholly, for, they said, "How should this boy tell us of a thing of which we have never heard!" But at the last the boy and their own misery persuaded them.
The Coyote advised them how the march should begin. The boy and the Counselor went foremost, next to them the swiftest runners, with the others following in the order of their strength and speed. They left the place of their home and went over the high mountains where great jagged peaks stand up above the snow, and down the way the streams led through a long stretch of giant wood where the sombre shade and the sound of the wind in the branches made them afraid. At nightfall where they rested one stayed in that place, and the next night another dropped behind, and so it was at the end of each day's journey. They crossed a great plain where waters of mirage rolled over a cracked and parching earth and the rim of the world was hidden in a bluish mist; so they came at last to another range of hills, not so high but tumbled thickly together, and beyond these, at the end of the hundred days, to the Big Water quaking along the sand at the foot of the Burning Mountain.
It stood up in a high and peaked cone, and the smoke of its burning rolled out and broke along the sky. By night the glare of it reddened the waves far out on the Big Water when the Fire Spirits began their dance.
Then said the Counselor to the boy who was soon to be called the Fire Bringer, "Do you stay here until I bring you a brand from the burning; be ready and right for running, and lose no time, for I shall be far spent when I come again, and the Fire Spirits will pursue me." Then he went up the mountain, and the Fire Spirits when they saw him come were laughing and very merry, for his appearance was much against him. Lean he was, and his coat much the worse for the long way he had come. Slinking he looked, inconsiderable, scurvy, and mean, as he has always looked, and it served him as well then as it serves him now. So the Fire Spirits only laughed, and paid him no farther heed. Along in the night, when they came out to begin their dance about the mountain, the Coyote stole the fire and began to run away with it down the slope of the Burning Mountain. When the Fire Spirits saw what he had done, they streamed out after him red and angry in pursuit, with a sound like a swarm of bees.
The boy saw them come, and stood up inhis place clean limbed and taut for running. He saw the sparks of the brand stream back along the Coyote's flanks as he carried it in his mouth and stretched forward on the trail, bright against the dark bulk of the mountain like a falling star. He heard the singing sound of the Fire Spirits behind and the labored breath of the Counselor nearing through the dark. Then the good beast panted down beside him, and the brand dropped from his jaws. The boy caught it up, standing bent for the running as a bow to speeding the arrow; out he shot on the homeward path, and the Fire Spirits snapped and sung behind him. Fast as they pursued he fled faster, until he saw the next runner stand up in his place to receive the brand. So it passed from hand to hand, and the Fire Spirits tore after it through the scrub until they came to the mountains of the snows. These they could not pass, and the dark, sleek runners with the backward-streaming brand bore it forward, shining star-like in the night, glowing red through sultry noons,violet pale in twilight glooms, until they came in safety to their own land. Here they kept it among stones, and fed it with small sticks, as the Coyote had advised, until it warmed them and cooked their food. As for the boy by whom fire came to the tribes, he was called the Fire Bringer while he lived, and after that, since there was no other with so good a right to the name, it fell to the Coyote; and this is the sign that the tale is true, for all along his lean flanks the fur is singed and yellow as it was by the flames that blew backward from the brand when he brought it down from the Burning Mountain. As for the fire, that went on broadening and brightening and giving out a cheery sound until it broadened into the light of day, and Alan sat up to hear it crackling under the coffee-pot, where his father was cooking their breakfast.
The pipsissawa, which is sometimes called prince's pine, is half as tall as the woodchuck that lives under the brown boulder; and the seedling fir in his first season was as tall as the prince's pine, so for the time they made the most of each other's company. The woodchuck and the pipsissawa were never to be any taller, but the silver fir was to keep on growing as long as he stood in the earth and drew sap. In his second season, which happened to be a good growing year, the fir was as tall as the woodchuck and began to look about him.
The forest of silver firs grew on a hill-slope up from a water-course as far as the borders of the long-leaved pines. Where the trees stood close together the earth was brown with the litter of a thousand years, and little gray hawks hunted in their green, windyglooms. In the open spaces there were thickets of meadowsweet, fireweed, monkshood, and columbine, with saplings and seedlings in between. When the fir which was as tall as the woodchuck had grown a year or two longer, he made a discovery. All the firs on the hill-slope were crooked! Their trunks bulged out at the base toward the downward pitch of the hill; and it is the proper destiny of fir trees to be straight.
"They should be straight," said the seedling fir. "I feel it in my fibres that a fir tree should be straight." He looked up at the fir mother very far above him on her way to the sky, with the sun and the wind in her star-built boughs.
"I shall be straight," said the seedling fir.
"Ah, do not be too sure of it," said the fir mother. But for all that the seedling fir was very sure, and when the snow tucked him in for the winter he took a long time to think about it. The snows are wonderfully deep in the cañon of the silver firs. From where they gather in the upper air the fir mother shakesthem lightly down, packing so softly and so warm that the seedlings and the pipsissawas do not mind.
About the time the fir had grown tall enough to be called a sapling he made another discovery. The fir mother had also a crooked trunk. The sapling was greatly shocked; he hardly liked to speak of it to the fir mother. He remembered his old friend the pipsissawa, but he had so outgrown her that there was really no comfort in trying to make himself understood, so he spoke to the woodchuck. The woodchuck was no taller than he used to be, but when he climbed up on the brown boulder above his house he was on a level with the sapling fir, and though he was not much of a talker he was a great thinker and had opinions.
"Really," said the fir, "I hardly like to speak of it, but you are such an old friend; do you see what a crook the fir mother has in her trunk? We firs you know were intended to be straight."
"That," said the woodchuck, "is on account of the snow."
"But, oh, my friend," said the sapling, "you must be mistaken. The snow is soft and comfortable and braces one up. I ought to know, for I spend whole winters in it."
"Gru-r-ru-," said the woodchuck crossly; "well for you that you do, or I should have eaten you off by now."
After this the little fir kept his thoughts to himself; he was very much afraid of the woodchuck, and there is nothing a young fir fears so much as being eaten off before it has a chance to bear cones. But in fact the woodchuck spent the winter under the snow himself. He went into his house and shut the door when the first feel of snow was in the air, and did not come out until green things began to grow in the cleared spaces.
Not many winters after that the fir was sufficiently tall to hold the green cross, that all firs bear on their topmost bough, above the snow most of the winter through. Now he began to learn a great many things. The first of these was about the woodchuck.
"Really that fellow is a great braggart,"said the fir; "I cannot think how I came to be afraid of him."
In those days the sapling saw the deer getting down in the flurry of the first snows to the feeding grounds on the lower hills, saw the mountain sheep nodding their great horns serenely in the lee of a tall cliff through the wildest storms. In the spring he saw the brown bears shambling up the trails, ripping the bark off of dead trees to get at the worms and grubs that harbored there; lastly he saw the woodchuck come out of his hole as if nothing had ever happened.
And now as the winters came on, the fir began to feel the weight of the snow. When it was wet and heavy and clung to its branches, the little fir shivered and moaned.
"Droop your boughs," creaked the fir mother; "droop them as I do, and the snow will fall."
So the sapling drooped his fan-spread branches until they lay close to the trunk; and the snow wreaths slipped away and piled thickly about his trunk. But when the snowlay deep over all the slope, it packed and slid down toward the ravine and pressed strongly against the sapling fir.
"Oh, I shall be torn from my roots," he cried; "I shall be broken off."
"Bend," said the fir mother, "bend, and you will not break." So the young fir bent before the snow until he was curved like a bow, but when the spring came and the sap ran in his veins, he straightened his trunk anew and spread his branches in a star-shaped whorl.
"After all," said the sapling, "it is not such a great matter to keep straight; it only requires an effort."
So he went on drooping and bending to the winter snows, growing strong and straight with the spring, and rejoicing. About this time the fir began to feel a tingling in his upper branches.
"Something is going to happen," he said; something agreeable in fact, for the tree was fifty years old, and it was time to grow cones. For fifty years a silver fir has nothing to dobut to grow branches, thrown out in annual circles, every one in the shape of a cross. Then it grows cones on the topmost whorl, royal purple and burnished gold, erect on the ends of the branches like Christmas candles. The sapling fir had only three in his first season of bearing, but he was very proud of them, for now he was no longer a sapling, but a tree.
When one has to devote the whole of a long season to growing cones, one has not much occasion to think of other things. By the time there were five rows of cone-bearing branches spread out broadly from the silver fir, the woodchuck made a remark to the pipsissawa which is sometimes called prince's pine. It was not the same pipsissawa, nor the same woodchuck, but one of his descendants, and his parents had told him the whole story.
"It seems to me," said he, "that the fir tree is not going to be straight after all. He never seems quite to recover from the winter snow."
"Ah," said the pipsissawa, "I have alwaysthought it better to have your seeds ripe and put away under ground before the snow comes. Then you do not mind it at all."
The woodchuck was right about the fir; his trunk was beginning to curve toward the downward slope of the hill with the weight of the drifts. And that went on until the curve was quite fixed in the ripened wood, and the fir tree could not have straightened up if he had wished. But to tell the truth, the fir tree did not wish. By the end of another fifty years, when he wagged his high top above the forest gloom, he grew to be quite proud of it.
"There is nothing," he said to the sapling firs, "like being able to endure hard times with a good countenance. I have seen a great deal of life. There are no such snows now as there used to be. You can see by the curve of my trunk what a weight I have borne."
But the young firs did not pay any attention to him. They had made up their minds to grow up straight.
Before the sugar pine came up in the meadow of Bright Water it had swung a summer long in the burnished cone of the parent tree, until the wind lifted it softly to the earth where it swelled with the snow water and the sun, and began to grow into a tree. But it knew nothing whatever of itself except that it was alive and growing; and in its first season was hardly so tall as the Little Grass of Parnassus that crowded the sod at the Bright Water. In fact, it was a number of years before it began to overtop the meadowsweet, the fireweed, the tall lilies, the monkshood, and columbine, and under these circumstances it could not be expected to have much of an opinion of itself.
During those years the young pine suffered a secret mortification because it had no flowers. It stood stiff and trimly in its plain dark green, every needle like every other one, andno honey-gatherer visited it. When all the meadow ran over with rosy and purple bloom, the pine tree trembled and beads of clear resin oozed out upon its bark like tears; and the trouble really seemed worse than it was because everybody made so much of it. Even the hummingbirds as they came hurtling through the air would draw back conspicuously when they came to the pine, and though they said politely, "I beg your pardon, I took you for a flower," the seedling felt it would have been better had they said nothing at all.
"Well, why don't you grow flowers?" said the meadowsweet; "it is easy enough. Just do as I do," and she spread her drift of blossoms like a fragrant snow. But the sugar pine found it impossible to be anything but stiff and plainly green, though every year in the stir and tingle of new sap he felt a promise of better things.
"I suppose," he said one day, "I must be in some way different from the rest of you."
"Ah, that is the way with you solemn people," said the fireweed, "always imagining yourself better than those about you to excuse your disagreeableness. Any one can see by the way you hold yourself that you have too much of an opinion of yourself."
The little pine tree sighed; he had not said "better," only "different," and he began to realize year by year that this was so.
"You should try to be natural," said the meadowsweet; "do not be so stiff, and then every one will love you though you are so plain."
Then the sugar pine reached out and tried to mingle with the flowers, but the sharp needles tore their frills and the stiff branches did not suit with their graceful swaying, so he was obliged to give it up. It seemed, in fact, the more he tried to be like the others the worse he grew.
"If only you were not so odd," said all the flowers. None of the young growing things in the meadow understood that it is natural for a pine tree to be stiff.
The sugar pine was not always unhappy.There were days when he caught golden glints of the stream that ran smoothly about the meadow, in a bed of leopard-colored stones, and, reflecting all the light that fell into the hollow of the hills, gave the place its name; days when the air was warm and the sky was purely blue, and the resinous smell of the pines on the meadow border came to the seedling like a sweet savor in a dream, for as yet he did not understand what he was to be. He was pleased just to be looking at the summer riot of the flowering things, and loved the cool softness of the snow when he was tucked into comfortable darkness to dream of the spring odor of the pines. Then, when it seemed that the meadow had forgotten him, the little tree would fall to thinking the thoughts proper to his kind, and found the time pass pleasantly.
"I suppose," he thought, "it is not good for me to flower as the other plants. If I began like them I should probably end like them, and I feel that I could not be satisfied with that. After all, one should not try to beso much like others, but to be the very best of one's own sort."
Very early the young tree had noticed that he was the only one of all that company that kept green and growing the winter through. He would have been secretly very proud of it, but the flowers took good care to let him know their opinion of such airs.
"It is simply that you wish to be considered peculiar," said the columbine; "one sees that you like nothing so much as to be in other people's mouths, but let me tell you, you will not get yourself any better liked by such behavior." After that the little tree wished nothing so much as that he might be the commonest summer-flowering weed.
"But I am not," he said; "no, I am not, and I would do very well as I am if they would let me be happy in my own way."
That summer the seedling grew as tall as the meadowsweet, and could look across the open space to the parent pine poised on her noble shaft, her spreading crown gathering sunshine from the draughts of upper air. Sheseemed to rock a little as if she dozed upon her feet, and the great sweep of limbs with pendulous golden cones made a gentle sighing. Then the despised little seedling felt a thrill go through him, and felt a shaking in all his slender twigs. He bowed himself among the lilies, and was both glad and ashamed, for though he could not well believe it, he knew himself akin to the great sugar pines. After that he gave up trying to be one of the flowers. Once he even ventured to speak of it to the meadowsweet.
"Well, if it is any satisfaction to you to think so; but do not let any one else hear you say that. You are likely to get yourself misunderstood. I tell you this because I am your friend," said the meadowsweet, but really she had misunderstood him herself.
Then a rumor arose in the neighborhood that the sombre, stubborn shrub conceited himself to be a pine, and the rumor ran with laughter and nodding the length of the meadow until it reached the old alder on the edge of Bright Water. The alder had stood with hisfeet in the stream for longer than the meadowsweet could remember, and saw everything that went on by reflection.
"Do not laugh too soon," said the alder tree, "I have seen stranger things than that happen in this meadow," for he was indeed very old.
"We have known him a good many seasons," said the fireweed, "and he has not done anything worth mentioning yet."
All this was very hard for the young pine to bear, but there was better coming. That summer the forest ranger came riding in Bright Water and a learned man rode with him, praising the flowers and counting the numbers and varieties of bloom. How they prinked and flaunted in their pride!
"That is all very pretty, as you say," answered the ranger as they came by the place of the pine, "and I suppose they perform a sort of service in keeping the soil covered, but the trees are the real strength of the mountain. Ah, here is a seedling of the right sort! I must give that fellow a chance," andhe began pulling up great handfuls of the blossoming things around the tree.
"What is it?" asked his companion.
"A sugar pine," he said; "probably a seedling of that splendid specimen yonder," and he went on clearing the ground to let in sun and air.
"But you must admit," said his friend, "that a seedling pine cuts rather a poor figure among all this flare of bloom."
"Oh, you wait fifty or sixty years," said the ranger, "and then you will see what sort of a figure it makes. It really takes a pine of this sort a couple of hundred years to reach its prime," and they rode talking up the trail.
Word of what had happened was carried all about the meadow and made a great stir. When it came to the alder tree he wagged his old head. "Ah, well," he said, "I told you so."
"I will not believe it until I see it," said the fireweed.
"They might have known it before," sighed the young pine, "and they ought to be proudto think I grew up in the same meadow with them."
But they were not; they went on flaunting their blossoms as if nothing had occurred, and the young tree grew up as he was meant to be, and the pines on the meadow border sent him greeting on the wind. He still kept his trim spire-shaped habit, but he could very well put up with that for the time being. He felt within himself the promise of what he was to be. After fifty or sixty years, as the ranger had said, he began to put out strong cone-bearing boughs that shaped themselves by the storms and the wind in sweeping, graceful lines, and spread out to shelter the horde of flowering things below. Squirrels ran up the trunk and whistled cheerily in his windy top.
"He grew here in our neighborhood," said the tall lilies; "we knew him when he was a seedling sprig, and now he is the tallest of the pines."
"Suppose he is," said the fireweed. "What is the good of a pine tree anyway?"
But the sugar pine did not hear. He had grown far above the small folk of the meadow, and went on growing for a hundred years. He gathered the sun in his high branches and rocked upon his shaft. He talked gently in his own fashion with his own kind.
AN OLD MINEAN OLD MINEFrom photograph by A. A. Forbes
From photograph by A. A. Forbes
A little way up from the trail that goes toward Rex Monte, not far from the limit of deep snows, there is what looks to be a round dark hole in the side of the mountain. It is really the ruined tunnel of an old mine. Formerly a house stood on the ore dump at one side of the tunnel, a little unpainted cabin of pine; but a great avalanche of snow and stones carried them, both the house and the dump, away. The cabin was built and owned by a solitary miner called Jerry, and whether he ever had any other name no one in the town below Kearsarge now remembers.
Jerry was old and lean, and his hair, which had been dark when he was young, was now bleached to the color of the iron-rusted rocks about his mine. For thirty years he had prospected and mined through that country from Kearsarge to the Coso Hills, but always inthe pay of other men, and at last he had hit upon this ledge on Rex Monte. To all who looked, it showed a very slender vein between the walls of country rock, and the ore of so poor a quality that with all his labor he could do no more than keep alive; but to all who listened, Jerry could tell a remarkable story of what it had been, and what he expected it to be. Very many years ago he had discovered it at the end of a long prospect, when he was tired and quite discouraged for that time. There was not much passing then on the Rex Monte, and Jerry drew out of the trail here in the middle of the afternoon to rest in the shadow of a great rock. So while he lay there very weary, between sleeping and waking, he gazed out along the ground, which was all strewn with rubble between the stiff, scant grass. As he looked it seemed that certain bits of broken stone picked themselves out of the heap, and grew larger, in some way more conspicuous, until, Jerry averred, they winked at him. Then he reached out to draw them in with his hand, and saw that they were allbesprinkled with threads and specks of gold. You may guess that Jerry was glad, then that he sprang up and began to search for more stones, and so found a trail of them, and followed it through the grass stems and the heather until he came to the ledge cropping out by a dike of weathered rocks. And in those days the ledge was ah, so rich! Now it seemed that Jerry was to have a mine of his own. So he named it the Golden Fortune, and told no man what he had found, but went down to the town which lies in a swale at the foot of Kearsarge, and brought back as much as was needful for working the mine in a simple way.
It was nearing the end of the summer, when the hills expect the long thunder and drumming rain, and, not many weeks after that, the quiet storms that bring the snow. Jerry had enough to do to make all safe and comfortable at the Golden Fortune before winter set in. It was too steep here on the hill-slope for the deep snows to trouble him much, so he built his cabin against the rock,with a covered way from it to the tunnel of the mine, that he might work on all winter at no unease because of storms.
It was perhaps a month later, with Jerry as busy as any of the wild folk thereabout, and the nights turning off bitter cold with frost. Of mornings he could hear the thin tinkle of the streams along fringes of delicate ice. It was the afternoon of a day that fell warm and dry with a promise of snow in the air. Jerry was roofing in his cabin, so intent that a voice hailed him before he was aware that there was a man on the trail. Jerry knew at once by his dress and his speech that he was a stranger in those parts, and he saw that he was not very well prepared for the mountain passes and the night. He knew this, I say, with the back of his mind, but took no note of it, for he was so occupied with his house and his mine. He suffered a fear to have any man know of his good fortune lest it should somehow slip away from him. So when the stranger asked him some questions of the trail, it seemed that what Jerry mostwished was to get rid of him as quickly as possible. He was a young man, ruddy and blue-eyed, and a foreigner, what was called in careless miners' talk, "some kind of a Dutchman," and could not make himself well understood. Jerry gathered that he desired to know if he were headed right for the trail that went over to the Bighorn Mine, where he had the promise of work. So they nodded and shrugged, and Jerry made assurance with his hands, as much as to say, it is no great way; and when the young man had looked wistfully at the cabin and the boding sky, he moved slowly up the trail. When he came to the turn where it goes toward Rex Monte, he lingered on the ridge to wave good-by, so Jerry waved again, and the man dropped out of sight. At that moment the sun failed behind a long gray film that deepened and spread over all that quarter of the sky.
Jerry had cause to remember the stranger in the night and fret for him, for the wind came up and began to seek in the cañon, and the snow fell slanting down. It fell threedays and nights. All that while the gray veil hung about Jerry's house; now and then the wind would scoop a great lane in it to show how the drifts lay on the heather, then shut in tight and dim with a soft, weary sound, and Jerry, though he worked on the Golden Fortune, could not get the young stranger out of his mind.
When the sun and the frost had made a crust over the snow able to bear up a man, he went over the Pass to Bighorn to inquire if the stranger had come in, though he did not tell at that time, nor until long after, how late it was when the man passed his cabin, how wistfully he turned away, nor what promise was in the air. The snow lay all about the Pass, lightly on the pines, deeply in the hollows, so deeply that a man might lie under it and no one be the wiser. And there it seemed the stranger must be, for at the Bighorn they had not heard of him, but if he were under the snow, there he must lie until the spring thaw. Of whatever happened to him, Jerry saw that he must bear the blame, for, by hisown account, from that day the luck vanished from the Golden Fortune; not that the ore dwindled or grew less, but there were no more of the golden specks. With all he could do after that, Jerry could not maintain himself in the cabin on the slope of Rex Monte. So it came about that the door was often shut, and the picks rusted in the tunnel of the Golden Fortune for months together, while Jerry was off earning wages in more prosperous mines.
All his days Jerry could not quite get his mind away from the earlier promise of the mine, and as often as he thought of that he thought of the stranger whom he had sent over the trail on the evening of the storm. Gradually it came into his mind in a confused way that the two things were mysteriously connected, that he had sent away his luck with the stranger into the deep snow. For certainly Jerry held himself accountable, and in that country between Kearsarge and the Coso Hills to be inhospitable is the worst offense.
Every year or so he came back to the mineto work a little, and sometimes it seemed to promise better and sometimes not. Finally, Jerry argued that the luck would not come back to it until he had made good to some other man the damage he had done to one. This set him looking for an opportunity. Jerry mentioned his belief so often that he came at last, as is the way of miners, to accept it as a thing prophesied of old time. Afterward, when he grew old himself, and came to live out his life at the Golden Fortune, he would be always looking along the trail at evening time for passers-by, and never one was allowed to go on who could by any possibility be persuaded to stay the night in Jerry's cabin. Often when there was a wind, and the snow came slanting down, Jerry fancied he heard one shouting in the drift; then he would light a lantern and sally forth into the storm, peering and crying.
About that time, when he went down into the town below Kearsarge once in a month or so for supplies, the people smiled and wagged their heads, but Jerry conceived that theywhispered together about the unkindness he had done to the stranger so many years gone, and he grew shyer and went less often among men. So he companioned more with the wild things, and burrowed deeper into the hill. His cabin weathered to a semblance of the stones, rabbits ran in and out at the door, and deer drank at his spring.
From the slope where the cabin stood, the trail, which led up from the town, winding with the winding of the cañon, went over the Pass, and so into a region of high meadows and high, keen peaks, the feeding-ground of deer and mountain sheep. The ravine of Rex Monte was the easiest going from the high valleys to the foothills, where all winter the feed kept green. Every year Jerry marked the trooping of the wild kindred to the foothill pastures when the snow lay heavily on all the higher land, and saw their returning when the spring pressed hard upon the borders of the melting drifts. So, as he grew older and stayed closer by his mine, Jerry learned to look to the furred and feathered folk for newsof how the seasons fared, and what was doing on the high ridges. When the grouse and quail went down, it was a sign that the snow had covered the grass and small seed-bearing herbs; the passing of deer—shapely bulks in a mist of cloud—was a portent of deep drifts over the buckthorn and the heather. Lastly, if he saw the light fleeting of the mountain sheep, he looked for wild and bitter work on the crest of Kearsarge and Rex Monte. It was mostly at such times that Jerry heard voices in the storm, and he would go stumbling about with his lantern into the swirl of falling snow, until the wind that played up and down the great cañon, like the draughts in a chimney, made his very bones a-cold. Then he would creep back to drowse by the warmth of his fire and dream that the blue-eyed stranger had come back and brought the luck of the Golden Fortune. So he passed the years until the winter of the Big Snow. It was so called many winters after, for no other like it ever fell on the east slope of Kearsarge.
It came early in the season, following aweek of warm weather, when the sky was full of a dry mist that showed ghostly gray against the sun and the moon; great bodies of temperate air moved about the pines with a sound of moaning and distress. The deer, warned by their wild sense, went down before ever a flake fell, and Jerry, watching, shivered in sympathy, recalling that so they had run together, and such a spell of warm weather had gone before a certain snow, years ago before the luck departed from the Golden Fortune. As the fume of the storm closed in about the cabin, and flakes began to form lightly in the middle air, the old man's wits began to fumble among remembrances of the stranger on the trail, and he would hearken for voices. The snow began, then increased, and fell steadily, wet and blinding.
The third night of its falling Jerry waked out of a doze to hear his name shouted, muffled and feebly, through the drift. So it seemed to him, and he made haste to answer it. There was no wind; on the very steep slope where the cabin stood was a knee-deeplevel, soft and clogging; in the hollows it piled halfway up the pines. Jerry's lantern threw a faint and stifled gleam. There was no further cry, but something struggled on the trail below him; dim, unhuman shapes wrestled in the smother of the snow. Jerry sent them a hail of assurance cut off short by the white wall of the storm.
There was a little sag in the hill-front where the trail turned off to the cabin, and here the moist snow fell in a lake, into which the trail ran like a spit, and was lost. Down this trail at the last fierce end of the storm came the great wild sheep, the bighorn, the heaviest-headed, lightest-footed, winter-proof sheep of the mountains that God shepherds on the high battlements of the hills. Down they came when there was no meadow, nor thicket, nor any smallest twig of heather left uncovered on the highlands, and took the lake of soggy snow by Jerry's cabin in the dark. They had come far under the weight of the great curved horns through the clogging drifts. Here where the trail failed in the whitesmudge they found no footing, floundered at large, sinking belly-deep where they stood, and not daring to stand lest they sink deeper. If any cry of theirs, hoarse and broken, had reached old Jerry's dreaming, they spent no further breath on it. By something the same sense that made him aware of their need, Jerry understood rather than saw them strain through the falling veil of snow. It was a sharp struggle without sound as they won out of the wet drift to the firmer ground. They went on like shadows pursued by the ghost of a light that wavered with the old man's wavering feet. It was no night for a man to be abroad in, but Jerry plowed on in the drift till he found the work that was cut out for him. There where the snow was deepest, yielding like wool, he found the oldest wether of the flock, sunk to the shoulders, too feeble for the struggle, and still too noble for complaining. How many years had Jerry waited to do a good turn on the trail where he had done his worst: and in all these years he had lost the sense of distinction which should bebetween man and beast. He put his shoulder under the fore shoulder of the sheep, where he could feel the heart pound with certain fear.
Jerry knew the trail, as he knew the floor of his mine, by the feel of the ground under him, so as he heaved and guided with his shoulder, the great ram grew quieter and lent himself to the effort till they came clear of the swale, and the sweat ran down from Jerry's forehead. But the bighorn could do no more. In the soft fleece of the snow he stood cowed and trembling. The snow came on faster, and wiped out the trail of the flock; he made no motion to go after. Such a death comes to the wild sheep of the mountains often enough: to fail from old age in some sudden storm, to sink in the loose snow and await the quest of the wolf, or the colder mercy of the drift. He turned his back to the storm which began to slant a little with the rising wind, and looked not once at Jerry nor at the hills where he had been bred. But Jerry cast his eye upon the sheep, which was full heavier then than he, and then up at the steep where his cabin stood,remembering that he had nothing there that might serve a sheep for food. Then he bent down again, and by dint of pulling and pushing, and by a dim sense that began to filter through the man's brain to the beast, they made some progress on the trail. They went over broken boulders and floundered in the drifts, where Jerry half carried the sheep and was half borne up and supported by the spread of the great horns. They crossed Pine Creek, which ran dumbly under the snow, housed over by the stream tangle. The flakes hissed softly on Jerry's lantern and struck blindingly on his eyes, but ever as they went the sheep was eased of his labor, grew assured, and carried himself courageously. Finally they came where the storm thinned out, and whole hill-slopes covered with buckthorn and cherry warded off the snow by springy arches, and Jerry drew up to rest under a long-leaved pine while the sheep went on alone, nodding his great horns under the branches of the scrub. He neither lingered nor looked back, and met the new chance of life with as much quietnessas the chance of death. Jerry was worn and weary, and there was a singing in his brain. The pine trees broke the wind and shed off the snow in curling wreaths. It seemed to the old man most good to rest, and he drowsed upon his feet.
"If I sleep I shall freeze," he said; and it seemed on the whole a pleasant thing to do. So it went on for a little space; then there came a shape out of the dark, a hand shook him by the shoulder, and a voice called him by name. Then he started out of dreaming as he had started at that other call an hour ago, and it seemed not strange to him, the night, nor the storm, nor the face of the blue-eyed man that shone out of the dark, but whether by the light of his lantern he could not tell. He shook the snow from his shoulders.
"I have expected you long," he said.
"And now I have come," said the stranger and smiled.
"Have you brought the luck again?"
"Come and see," said the man.
Then Jerry took his hand and leaned uponhim, and together they went up the trail between the drifts.
"You bear me no ill-will for what I did?" said Jerry.
And the stranger answered, "None."
"I have wished it undone many times," said the old man. "I have tried this night to repay it."
"By what you have done this night I am repaid," said the stranger.
"It was only a sheep."
"It was one of God's creatures," said the man.
So they went on up the trail, and it seemed sometimes to Jerry that he wandered alone in the dark, that he was cold, and his lantern had gone out; and again he would hear the stranger comfort and encourage him. At last they came toward the cabin, and saw the light stream out of the window and the fire leap in the stove. Then Jerry thought of the mine, and that the stranger had brought back the luck again. It seemed that the young man had promised him this, though he could not be sure of that, norvery clear in his mind on any point except that he had come home again. But as he drew near, it seemed a brightness came out of the tunnel of the mine, a warmth and a great light. As he came into it tremblingly, he saw that the light came from the walls, and from the lode at the far end of it, and it was the brightness of pure gold. And Jerry smiled and stretched out his arms to it, making sure that the luck had come again.
After the week of the Big Snow there were people in the town who remembered Jerry, and wondered how he fared. So when the snow had a crust over it, they came up by the windy cañon and sought him in his house, where the door stood open and a charred wick flared feebly in the lamp, and in his mine, where they found him at the far end of the tunnel, and it seemed as if he slept and smiled.
"It is a worthless lode," they said, "but he loved it."
So they took powder and made a blast, and with it a great heap of stones, shutting off the end of the tunnel from the outer air, and so left him with his luck and the Golden Fortune.
The white-barked pine grew on the slope of Kearsarge highest up of all the pines, so high that nothing grew above it but brown tufts of grass and the rosy Sierra primroses that shelter under the edges of broken boulders. The white-barked pines are squat and short, trunks creeping along the rocks, and foliage all matted in a close green thatch by the winter's weight. Snow lies on the slope of Kearsarge eight months in the year, deep and smooth over the pines and the jagged rocks; other months there are great storms of rain, and always a strong wind roaring through the Pass, so that, try as it might, no tree could stand erect on those heights. The white-barked pine stretched its body along the ground, and though it was four hundred years old, it was no thicker than a man's leg, and its young branches of seventy-five or a hundred years were still so supplethat one could tie knots in them. It grew near the trail, which here crossed through a gap in the crest of the range and straggled on down the other side of the mountain.
Along this trail went many strange things in their season. Early in the year, before the snow had melted at all on the high places, went a great lumbering bear that had a lair above Big Meadows, going down to the calf-pens and pig-sties of the town at the foot of Kearsarge. He ranged back and forth on these little excursions of fifteen or twenty miles in the hungry season of the year, and sometimes there were hunters on his trail with dogs and guns, but nothing ever came of it. When the trail began to run a rivulet from the drip of melting snow banks, the forest ranger went up the Pass, singing as he went and beating his arms to keep himself warm. Afterwards when the snow water was all drained off, he came back and mended the trail. All through the summer there would be parties of miners and hunters with long strings of pack mules, going over Kearsarge to camp in Big Meadowsor on the fork of King's River. Sometimes there were parties of Indians with women and children, making very merry with berries, fish, and deer meat. Nearly always, whatever went over the mountain came back again, and the white pine noticed that the same people came again another season. In four hundred years one has space for observation and reflection. Gradually the pine tree grew into the conviction that the other side of the mountain must be much finer than this.
"Else why," said he, "should so many people go there every year?"
It was very fine, you may be sure, on the white pine's side, but the tree had known it all for so many years, it no longer pleased him. From where he grew he looked down between the ridges on a great winding cañon full of singing trees, with blue lakes like eyes winking between them. He could watch in the open places the white feet of the water on its way to the valley, and from the falls long rainbows of spray blown out as if they were blowing kisses to the white-barked pine. Below all this lay thevalley, hollow like a cup, full of fawn-colored and violet mist, and the farms and orchards lay like dregs at the bottom of the cup. Beyond the valley rose other noble ranges with cloud shadows playing all along their slopes.
"It is very tiresome to look at the same things for four hundred years," said the white-barked pine. "If I could only get to the top, now. Do tell me, what is it like on the other side?" he said to the wind.
"Oh!" said the wind, "it rains and snows. There are trees and bushes and blue lakes. It is not at all different from this side."
A deer said the same thing when it slept one night under the thatch of the highest pine. "It is all meadows and hills, only sometimes the grass is not so good there, and again sometimes it is better. It is very much like this."
"I do not believe them," said the pine to himself. "They are simply trying to console me for not realizing my ambition. But I am not a sapling any longer, let me tell you that."
"At least," said a young tree that grew alittle farther down, "you are higher up than any of us."
"Of what use is that if I do not get to the top?" said the unhappy pine. "There is a bunch of blue flowers there, I can see it quite plainly just where the trail dips over the ridge. Surely I am as capable of climbing as any blue weed."
"But," said the young pine, "weeds do not have to grow cones."
"Oh, as for cones," cried the tree quite crossly, "the seasons are so short I hardly ever ripen any, and if I do the squirrels get them. I do believe I have not started a seedling these two hundred years. It is no use to talk to me, I shall be happy only when I have seen the other side of the mountain."
It seems what one desires with all one's heart for a long time finally comes to pass in some fashion or other. That very season the white-barked pine went up over Kearsarge to the other side. Early in the summer, when the rosy primroses had just begun to blow beside the drifts that hugged the shade of the boulders, a party of miners went up the trail with a long string of pack mules burdened with picks and shovels, flour and potatoes, and other things that miners use. The last pull up the Kearsarge trail is the hardest, over a steep waste of loose stones that want very little encouragement to go roaring down as an avalanche into the ravine below. The miners shouted, the mules scrambled and panted on the steep, but just as they came by the last of the white-barked pines, one slipped and went rolling over and over on the jagged stones. As happens very frequently when a pack animal falls, the mule was not very much hurt, but the pack saddle was quite ruined.
"We must do the best we can," said one of the men, and he cut down the white-barked pine. He chopped off the boughs, and split the trunk in four pieces to mend the pack. It was a very small tree though it was so old.
"Ah! Ah!" said the tree, "it hurts, but one does not mind that when one is realizing an ambition. Now I shall go to the top." Sohe went over Kearsarge on mule-back quite like an old traveler.
"Well, we are rid of his complaining," said the pine who stood next to him, "and nowIam the highest up of all the pines. I wonder if it is really so much finer on the other side."
His old companion, in four pieces, was swinging down the other side of the mountain, and as he went, he saw high peaks and soddy meadows, long winding cañons with white glancing waters; and heard the chorus of the falls. When it was night the miners lit a fire and loosened up the packs, and after dark, when the wind began to move among the trees and the fire burned low, one of the men threw a piece of the white-barked pine on it.
"Oh! Oh!" cried the pine as the flames caught hold of it, "and is this really the end of all my travels?"
"How that green wood sputters!" said the man; "it is not fit even for firewood."
The next day the wind took up the ash and carried it back over the pass, and dropped itwhere the chopped boughs lay fainting on the ground.
"Ah, is that you?" they said; "now you can tell us what it is like on the other side."
"How ignorant you are," said the ash of the white-barked pine, "one would know you have never traveled. It is exactly like this side." But he could not hear what they had to say to that, for the wind whirled him away.
The Basket Woman was walking over the mesa with the great carrier at her back. Behind her straggled the children and the other women of the campoodie, each with a cone-shaped basket slung between her shoulders. Alan clapped his hands when he saw them coming, and ran out along the path.
"You come see rabbit drive," she said, twinkling her shrewd black eyes under the border of her basket cap. Alan took hold of a fold of her dress as he walked beside her, for he was still a little afraid of the other Indians, but since the time of his going out to see the buzzards making a merry-go-round, he knew he should never be afraid of the Basket Woman again. The other women laughed a great deal as they looked at him, showing their white teeth and putting back the blackcoarse hair out of their eyes, and Alan felt that the things they said to each other were about him, though they could hardly have been unpleasant with so much smiling. Now he could see the men swarm out of the huts under the hill, all afoot but a dozen of the old men, who rode small kicking ponies at a tremendous pace, digging their heels into the horses' ribs. They passed up the mesa in a blur of golden dust; westward they dwindled to a speck, something ran between them from man to man, now thick like a cord, then shaken out and vanishing in air. Then the riders dropped from their horses and fumbled on the ground. Alan plucked at the Basket Woman's dress.
"Tell me what it is they do," he said.
"It is the net which they set with forked stakes of willow," answered the Basket Woman. Now the young men and the middle-aged began to form a line across the mesa, standing three man's lengths apart in the sage. Some of them were armed with guns and others had only clubs; all were merry, laughing and calling to one another. They began to move forward evenly with a marching movement, beating the brush as they went. Presently up popped a rabbit from the sage and ran before them in long flying leaps; far down the line another bounded from a stony wash, his lean flanks turned broadside to the sun.
Then the hunters broke into shouts of laughter and clapping, then one began to sing and the song passed from man to man along the line; then the men crouched a little as Indians do in singing, then their bodies swayed and they stamped with each staccato note as they moved forward. Rabbits sprang up in the scrub and went before them like the wind, and as each one leaped into view and laid back his ears in flight, the cries and laughter grew and the singing rose louder. The wind blew it back to the women and children straggling far behind, who took it up, and the burden of it was this,—