The road into which they presently came astonished the Duke of Dorset. It was sixty feet wide, smooth as a boulevard and drained with tile. It was supported below by a stone wall, surmounted by a balustrade, and was protected from the slipping of the mountain, at certain points, by a parallel stone wall equally massive. It was covered brown and soft with a carpet of fir needles, and arose in an easy grade above the sea, turning northeastward into the mountains. Strewn with the foliage of autumn, the fir needles, wisps of yellow fern, hits of branches swept together against the stone wall by the wind, it seemed a thing toned and softened into harmony with the wilderness through which it ran.
The stone balustrade set there, naked and jarring, by the builder, had been planted along its border with vines. Vines massed the whole of it; vines patched, laced, and streaked with crimson, with yellow, with green of a thousand shades, moving from one color imperceptibly into another. The wall, too, set against the face of the mountain was thus screened and latticed. The vines fed with dampness from the earth behind the wall were almost wholly green, while those banking the balustrade were largely crimson, a mass of scarlet, flecked with dead leaves, falling now and then, with a faint crackling like tiny twigs snapping in a fire.
The scene was a thing fantastic and tropical. Below was the sea, to the eye oiled and polished, bedded with opal, shifting in the light; and above were the gigantic firs, their brown bodies standing close in a sort of twilight, cast by the verdigris branches crowded together, shutting out the sky; and between, the road crept upward, winding across ravines into the mountains, banked with green and scarlet, and carpeted soft to the foot with brown.
Hurriedly—with a haste incomparable—the wilderness had adopted this intruder; within five years it had covered from sight every trace of human fingers; the work had been swiftly done, and yet carried the effect of years leisurely expended. Nature returning with all things slowly to the wilderness centuries after man was dead. The Duke of Dorset was not a person easily swung skyward by a bit of sun and color. He was accustomed to that brooding mood, lying over solitary lands; to the dignity, to the majestic silence, obtaining in the courts of Nature; to the gorgeous pageantry of that fantastic empress; to the strange, almost human hurry with which she strove to obliterate any trace of man encroaching on her kingdom. And yet, he could not recall anything on the continent of Europe equal to this scene, unless the mountain behind the great road leading to Amalfi, above the Mediterranean, were again clothed with that primeval forest marked by the Phoenician.
The Duke followed behind the big swinging mountaineer and his gaunt, gigantic mule, all moving without a sound, over the bed of soft fir needles, along this road thus clothed and colored as though infinitely old. They might have been traveling on some highway of that mighty fabled empire for which Fernando de Soto hunted the wilderness, with men in armor.
It was a day of autumn, soft in this Western country. A time of Indian summer, the sky deep blue, with here and there a cloud island, unmoving as though painted on a canvas. The mountain chain running northward along the coast faded imperceptibly into haze. Above and within the immediate sweep of the eye the day was bright, but when the eye lifted to a distance the haze deepened, as with smoke coming somewhere from behind the world.
The Duke of Dorest lengthened his stride and came up to the mountaineer. He wished to know something about this remarkable estate, having the sea and wilderness for boundary. He wondered how old it was, how long this road had been built—the work looked like the labor of centuries.
"How long has Mr. Childers owned this estate?" inquired the Duke.
"About ten year, I reckon," replied the man.
"And before that," said the Duke, "who owned it?"
The mountaineer, lifting his chin, took a deep breath and exhaled it slowly between his lips.
"Well, stranger," he drawled, "I reckon God Almighty owned hit before that."
"You mean," said the Duke, "that this whole estate was then wilderness as I see it here?"
"Jist as the blessed God made hit," replied the man, "before He rested on the seventh day."
The Duke understood now something of the plan of this American Childers. He had secured, here on the coast, a great tract of wild, primeval forest, and was making of it an estate suited to his fancy. He smiled at the assurance of one assuming a labor so gigantic. Either the man was a dreamer, forgetting the brevity of life, or he was Pharaoh, or more likely yet, a fool. It took three hundred years to make a garden; and yet here was a great wilderness cleaned of its fallen timber and climbing through the mountain was this road—the work surely of no little man steeped in fancies. The Duke, pricked to wonder, strove to draw from the mountaineer some idea of this man, but he got in answer a jumble of extravagance and prophecy, drawled out in a medley of idiom, imagery, and scrappy biblical excerpts.
Childers was like those seditious persons who had builded the Tower of Tongues, like that one who had embellished Babylon; he had come into the West, got this great tract of virgin country, "an' set up shop agin', God Almighty!" The man made a great sweeping gesture, covering the mountains to the east. Who was Childers to change what God was pleased with? This night, or on some night desperately near, his soul would be required of him. He was over eighty. Did he hope to live forever? He had finished the term allotted man to live, and by reason of strength, had made it fourscore years. Did he think that Death, riding his pale horse, had forgotten the road leading to his door? Pride goeth before destruction! But this was something more than pride. It was a sort of sedition—a sedition that Jehovah would put down with the weapon of iron and the steel bow.
The declamation amused and puzzled the Duke of Dorset. He attributed the motive of it to the universal dislike of the peasant for the landed proprietor, to the distress with which the aborigine sees his forest felled and his rivers bridged. But the speech of it; the biblical words with which it was clothed; the intimate knowledge of the Hebrew Scripture which it indicated, was a thing, in this illiterate mountaineer, wholly incredible.
The man was swinging forward with long strides; the gunny sack across his shoulder; the mule's bridle over the crook of his arm; his tanned face stolid as leather. The Duke, walking beside him, put the question moving in his mind.
"My friend," he said, "what trade is it that you follow?"
The man walked on a moment, as though uncertain in what catalogue of trades he should be listed. He put up his hand and loosed the white button on his shirt, leaving his broad-corded throat, tanned like his face, open to the air. He thrust his thumb under his woolen brace, lifted it slowly, and moved his thumb down from the shoulder to the trousers button. Finally he spoke, coupling his vocations, since he was not able to say that either occupied exclusively his talents.
"Well, stranger," he said, "I crap some, an' I preach the Word."
The Duke did not understand this answer, and he probed for a further explanation. He learned that the man was not a native, that he had come here from the great range of mountains running along the western border of Virginia. He had come, as he believed, by a Divine direction. The angel of the Lord had appeared to him and said: "Arise and get thee across the desert into the wilderness, for God hath there a work for thee to do." And he had obeyed, as Philip before him had obeyed, when that angel had directed him to go toward the south unto the way that goeth down from Jerusalem unto Gaza, which is a desert.
The Duke of Dorset vaguely understood then that the man was some sort of little farmer and some sort of priest, come hither on some imagined mission. But he had no idea of the circuit rider, that primitive, sturdy, religious enthusiast who believed in a God of vengeance and a hell of fire, as the Scriptures said it; who took his theology from no school of cardinals, from no articles of faith; who recognized no man standing between himself and God; who read the Bible and no other book—moving his broad finger slowly along under the line—and took that Book to mean literally what it said. A servant of God, but of no authority below Him. And yet a mountaineer, illiterate and narrow, poor as the peasants of Russia, tilling a bit of land for the barest necessities of life, and traveling incredible distances to the cabin church for no pay save that promise to him beyond the reach of rust.
The Duke of Dorset got his answer, and he got something more than that, he got his question back. He had opened the door, and he could not immediately close it.
"An' you, stranger," the man had added, "what might you do?"
The Duke smiled to find this question as difficult for him as it had been for his companion. He walked as far and he took as long a time to answer as the mountaineer. He was greatly amused, but he was also somewhat puzzled. He found himself fingering his chin, thumbing his waistcoat, like this farmer priest. Then he laughed. "I believe I could get a living with the rifle," he said, "if I had to do it."
The man took the answer in all seriousness and with composure.
"Well," he said, drawling the words as though they were a reminiscence, "this were a great huntin' country, I reckon, before Childers set up fur God Almighty."
The mountaineer lifted his sack from one shoulder carefully to the other, glanced up at the sun, standing above the mountain, and clucked to his mule. The Duke of Dorset, walking beside the man, studied him through the corner of his eye. The bulk and sinew of the man contrasted strangely with his gentle manner.
His words of withering invective contrasted still more conspicuously with the drawling gentle tone in which they were spoken. The Duke of Dorset was acquainted with the mad priest, the passionate fanatic, furious, lashing, but here was one who said these things softly, with no trace of feeling, like one speaking a doom as gently as he could.
The Duke began to regard the man with a newer interest. He wondered on what errand the man was going when he found him, and what it was that he carried so tenderly in his sack, as though it were a thing fragile and delicate. He had seen a Scottish gillie carry jugs of whisky carefully like that in the ends of a bag swung over a pony. With the thought he gave the sack a little closer notice. He observed that the mountaineer attended thus carefully to but one end of the sack, the end which he carried over his shoulder on his chest, the other end he left to pound and swing as it liked.
At noon the great road, winding in a gentle grade around the mountain, spanning its gullies with stone arches, reached the summit, and the mountaineer turned out, following a trail along the ridge to a knoll—covered, as the road was, with a carpet of brown fir needles, and bordered with a few old trees, huge and wind shaken. Below this knoll, welling out over the roots of trees, was a spring of water, running into a bowl, deep as a bucket, cut out of the rock. The men drank and then the mule thrust her nose up to the eye pits into the crystal water and gulped it down in great swallows, that ran like a chain of lumps, one after the other, under the skin of her gullet. The mountaineer removed the sack carefully from his shoulder, and opened the end which had been swinging all the morning against his back. This end of the sack contained oats, and clearing a place on the ground with his foot, he poured the oats down for the mule's dinner; then, he got out a strip of raw bacon, wrapped in a greasy paper, some boiled potatoes, a baked grouse, and what the Duke took to be a sort of scone, very thick and very yellow.
"I reckon we wont stop to do no cookin' jist now," the mountaineer observed apologetically, and returned the bacon to its greasy wrapper. Then he opened his hands over the frugal luncheon.
"Strengthen us with this heah food, O God Almighty! so our hands kin be strong to war, an' our fingers to fight agin the Devil an' his angels."
And the two men ate, as men eat together in the wilderness, without apology and without comment. When he had finished, the Duke of Dorset stretched himself out on the warm fir needles with a cigarette in his fingers.
The mountaineer took a pipe out of his trousers pocket, the bowl, a fragment of Indian corncob, the stem cut from an elder sprout, and with it some tobacco. He looked at the Duke a moment hesitating, with the articles in his hand, then he said: "Stranger, air you in a right smart hurry?"
The Duke opened his eyes; above him was the sky, deep, blue, fathomless, latticed out by the crossing fir tops; under him the bed was soft and warm, the pungent air of the forest crept into his lungs like opium.
"No," he answered, "why hurry out of a paradise like this." Then he dropped the cigarette from his fingers and lay motionless, looking out over the world of forest. The mountaineer filled his pipe, crumbling the tobacco in his hard palm, lighted it with a sputtering sulphur match and smoked, leaning back against the giant tree trunk—a figure of incomparable peace.
Presently the Duke of Dorset, looking landward across the mountains, dreamy, soft, rising into a sky of haze, caught a bit of deepened color, a patch of some darker haze lying above the distant sky line—lifting a wisp of black, and spreading faintly, like a blot against that shimmering nimbus in which the world was swimming. The thing caught and held the Duke's wayward attention. He sat up and pointed his finger eastward.
"Is that a forest fire?" he said.
The mountaineer took his pipe out of his mouth, regarded the distant horizon for a time in silence, then he replied slowly. "No," he said, "hit air not a forest fire."
"What is it, then?" said the Duke.
"Well, stranger," replied the mountaineer, "I call that air thing, 'The Sign.'"
Then he arose abruptly, like one who had said more than he intended, took up his rope bridle from the ground, forced the bit into the mule's mouth, and stood caressing the beast's nose, and drawing her great ears softly through his hand.
The Duke of Dorset got up slowly and stood looking out over the mountains, with his hands clasped behind him. Below the dark-green canopy of fir tops descended to a gleam of water; through the brown tree trunks the great road wound in and out; beyond that thin gleam another mountain shouldered into the one on which he stood, and the brown carpet and the verdigris canopy went again upward fantastically to the sky. When the Duke turned the mountaineer was tying up the mouth of his sack.
"My friend," said the Duke, "this road seems to wind around the mountain. As the crow flies this distance should be less than half. Is there no short trail from the coast?"
"Yes, stranger," replied the man, "there's a trail laid out by the deer that hain't so ladylike." He made a circular gesture with his arm. "Hit runs acrost the backbone from the sea. The deer didn't have no compass, but he had a purty notion of short cuts."
"Could we not take this trail down the mountain?" inquired the Duke.
The mountaineer stroked his chin, "I reckon we'd better mosey along the road to the bottom," he answered, "the trail's some botherin' to a mewel."
Something in the man's manner told the Duke that he, rather than the mule, was the object of this consideration. The man's eyes rested on his light tweeds, doubtless thought unfitted to the thicket. The Duke was taken with the fancy to push his suggestion a little.
"If you were alone," he said, "would you not follow this trail?"
The mountaineer was embarrassed. The courtesy at his heart was right, but the trick of phrasing it was crude. He was a man accustomed to move, like the forces of Nature, on a line, and he could not easily diverge from it.
"Well," he said, "if I was in a powerful hurry, I reckon I'd let Jezebel take her chance on this air trail." Then a memory seized him and his face lightened, "But, I axed you, stranger, an' you said you warn't in no sich powerful hurry."
The Duke's impression was established, but his objection was also conclusively met. He returned smiling with the clumsy diplomat and Jezebel to the great road.
All the long, hazy afternoon they descended the mountain, on the brown, noiseless carpet, stretched between its walls of green dashed with scarlet. For the most part the men traveled steadily in silence, as the pioneer and the Indian travel always in the wilderness. Now and then, the mountaineer pointed out something of interest; an eagle rising in circles from some green abyss. He named the eagle with a certain scorn; he was a robber like Barabbas. The fishhawk that he plundered was a better man, for he got his bread in toil fairly, as theGood Booksaid it. What a man earned by his own labor he had a right to, but beyond that there was God to settle with. The Duke sought to turn the conversation on this sentence, as on a hinge, to Childers. He felt, that behind the first expressions of this man concerning the American, something definite and threatening moved, but he got little. It was not that Childers had great possessions, it was a sort of Divine treason that he was guilty of. He had "set up shop agin God Almighty!" Childers was old, almost alone—all of his kin had gone before him through the door of death. No one of his blood remained, except an orphaned niece, to sit after him in his place. Jehovah had held back his hand many years, But His wrath would only he the more terrible when that hand descended.
The man spoke gently, softly and in pity, like one who foresaw, but could not prevent a doom already on its way. Had there been passion or any touch of bitterness in the man's speech it would have passed over the Duke of Dorset, but coming thus it moved strangely with the impulse bringing him westward over four thousand miles of sea. That impulse lifted into a premonition. Something, then, threatened this girl whose face remained in his memory. He had come at some call! He was seized with a strange query. Did he know this danger, and the man walking beside him, have only the premonition of it; or did this man know it, and he have that premonition?
The Duke became curious to know if any fact underlay this man's shadowy forebodings. He sounded for it through the long afternoon, but he could touch nothing. The mountaineer seemed curiously timid, hesitating like a child that could not be brought to say what was turning in his mind, lest he should not be able to explain it. The man and everything moving about him deeply puzzled the Duke of Dorset. Hour after hour he studied him as they swung down the mountain, always on that noiseless carpet. The man seemed like an old, gentle child, and yet, a certain dignity, and a certain matrix of elements, strong, primal, savage, sat like a shadow behind that child. The Duke felt that the expression of the man's face was not permanent, that the child might on occasion fade out and another occupy the foreground. But not easily; that expression sat bedded in a great peace, as though fixed in plaster. If this thing was the result of struggle it surpassed, indeed, the taking of a city.
Related, somehow, to this fancy, one slight detail of the man's dress caught the Duke's attention. It was a thick, conical, lead bullet strung through the middle on a buckskin string that was looped around the woolen brace above the trousers button. The bullet was as big as that of the old English Snyder, and would easily weigh five hundred grains. It was snubbed off at the end and ridged at the base with concentric rings cut into the lead. The Duke's interest lifted into a query.
"What sort of bullet is that?" he said.
The mountaineer ran his big thumb over the deep ridges. "Hit's a Minie ball," he answered.
The Duke was certain that some history attached to this piece of lead. "May I inquire," he said, "where you got it?"
The man's face relaxed into a smile. "Well, stranger," he answered, "I shot that air ball into a man onct when I was a young feller, an' then I cut it out of him."
The smile, the gentle, drawling tone, clashed with the brutal inference. The Duke probed for the story, and with difficulty he got it, in fragments, in detached detail, in its own barbaric color. Not because the man wished to tell it, but because, under the Duke's skillful handling, he was somehow not able to prevent it. It was a Homeric fragment, with the great, bloody, smoking war between the American States for a background. A story, big with passion, savage, virile, hot with life.
A Northern general was marching desperately across the South. With money he had hired a native out of the mountains to conduct him. The man was a neighbor to this circuit rider, one who knew the wilderness as the bear knew it. In terror, the authorities of the State had sent a messenger to this youthful hermit priest, bidding him stop the renegade before he got down from his cabin to the Federal camp, and, without a word, the circuit rider had taken down his rifle from the wooden pegs, and gone out into the wilderness. From that morning, gray, chill, three hours before the dawn, the story was a thing savage and hideous. At daybreak the circuit rider, leaning on his rifle, two hundred yards from the other's cabin, called him to the door, explained what he had come to do, and gave him an hour of grace. Within that hour, the renegade—a man, too, courageous and desperate—fired his cabin, and walked with his rifle over his shoulder, across his little clearing, into the opposite border of the forest. Then for three endless days and nights, they hunted each other through this wilderness, now one, and now the other, escaping death by some incredible instinct, or some narrow, thrilling margin that left the breath of the bullet on his face. Below the Northern general waited with his army, and the militia of the State waited, too, hanging on his flanks.
Then, finally, on the morning of the fourth day at sunrise, the circuit rider, trailing his man all night, stopping behind a ledge of stone, by chance, as the sun struck down the face of the mountain, saw the other seated in the fork of a great pine, watching back over his trail for his enemy that followed. With deliberate and deadly care the circuit rider shot him. The man fell hanging across the limb, and his enemy climbed the tree and descended with the body in his arms. The bullet had struck the bone near the point of the jaw, ripped up the cheek and followed the bone around the head, under the skin to the spine. Sitting on the earth the mountaineer cut the bullet out, bandaged the wound with the rags of his shirt, and taking the man in his arms walked down the mountain into his enemies' camp; walked through it unmolested, carrying his bloody burden to the commanding officer's tent door. There he laid the man down on the ground, hideously wounded, looked the officer steadily in the face, and spoke his word of comment.
"General," he said, "heah's your renegade. He hain't as purty as he was."
The Duke of Dorset looked up at the mountain, from which they had descended. The story of that tragedy, pieced together out of these fragments, thrilled him like a Saga. He could see the army waiting below, idle in its camp, while this death struggle went silently on, in the great, smoky wilderness above it. He followed, with every detail, vividly, these two desperate men, stalking one another with every trick, every cunning, every artifice. With unending patience, their eyes narrowed to slits, their ears straining, noiseless, tireless, ghastly with fatigue; eating as they crept, sleeping as they crept, mad, desperate, hideous, moving with the lust of death!
And then on some morning when the sun dozed against the mountain, when the air was soft, when the world lay silent, as under a benediction, there came down out of this wilderness, this haze, this mystery, a creature streaked with sweat, gaunt, naked, lurching as it walked, carrying a thing doubled together, that dripped blood.
At sunset they came to the bottom of the mountain, and camped there in a little forest of spruce trees, beside a river, wider and deeper than the Teith. Its bed colored dark, like the Scottish rivers, not with peat, but with a stronger pigment, leeched out of roots. The great road continued along this river, but the guide explained that he would ford it here in the morning, cross the shoulder of the abutting mountain on a trail, and thus save half a day of travel. They would stop here at sundown for the night if the Duke were still agreeable to such leisure. The Duke was pleased to stop. He unpacked the mule and washed her shoulders in the river, while his companion lighted a fire and prepared the supper. The mule was fed and turned loose to crop what green things she could find. The mountaineer cooked his strips of bacon on a forked twig, held over the smoldering fire, and laid out the supper on the top of one of the Duke's good leather boxes. To men who had walked all day through the forest, in the clear air, under a sun that crept, like a tonic, subtly into the blood, the odor of this dinner, mingling with the deep pungent smells of the river and the forest, was a thing incomparably delicious.
Night swiftly descended. Pigeons winged into the tree tops. The stars came out. The pirates of the river crept through the yellow bracken, and swam boldly out on their robbing raid, their quaint inky faces lifted above the shimmering water. The Duke of Dorset smoked a pipe with his companion, seated on a packing case upturned by the fire. He smoked in silence, his face relaxed and thoughtful. Long after the pipe had gone out, after the smoke had vanished, after the bowl had cooled, he sat there, unmoving, the firelight flickering on his face. Then he arose slowly, unstrapped a roll of traveling rugs, handed one to his companion, and, wrapping himself in the other, lay down by the fire.
The mountaineer carried in a heavy limb, wrenched off by the wind, thrust the ragged end of it into the fire, and sat down again to his pipe. Presently the Duke of Dorset, wrapped in his rug, seemed to sleep, breathing deeply and slowly. The mountaineer came to the end of his pipe, knocked out the ashes, returned it to his pocket, and regarded the Duke carefully for a moment. Then, he thrust his arm into the sack that lay beside him on the ground, and took out the thing that he had carried all the day with so great a care.
The Duke, awakened by the crackling of the spruce limb on the fire, watched the man through his half-closed eyelids. It was a bulky packet, wrapped in a piece of deerskin. The mountaineer laid it on his knees and unrolled it carefully. Within was a huge leather-bound Bible with a great brass clasp three inches in diameter. The man spread out the deerskin on his knees so the book might not be soiled, unhooked the clasp, and, turning to a page, began to read.
His lips moved, forming the words, and his big finger traveled along the page slowly under the line. But he read silently, stopping now and then, with his face lifted as though in deep contemplation of the passage. The Duke of Dorset, dozing into sleep, wondered vaguely what portion of the Hebrew Scriptures this strange, gentle person read.
The man, as he read, as his attention passed to the subject, began unconsciously to murmur. His lips, forming the words, began unconsciously to speak them, in a voice low, drawling, almost inaudible. The Duke, straining his ear, caught, now and then, a fragment.
I will also make it a possession for the bittern, and pools of water: and I will sweep it with the besom of destruction, said the Lord of hosts.... The cormorant and the bittern shall possess it; the owl also and the raven shall dwell in it: and he shall stretch out upon it the line of confusion, and the stones of emptiness.... And the wild beasts of the islands shall cry in their desolate houses, and dragons their pleasant palaces: and her time is near to come, and her days shall not be prolonged.... And owls shall dwell there, and satyrs shall dance there.
The Duke of Dorset fell asleep with that picture fading into his dreams; the man's massive gentle face banked in shadow; the light, pouring blood red over the brass clasp of the book; the big bronzed finger moving slowly on the page; and the man's voice droning in cadence with the river.
The night deepened. Soft footsteps passed closer in the forest. The pirates of the river returned stained with murder, swimming like shadows, without a sound, as under some gift of silence. The great limb became an ember. The man's voice ceased. He closed the book and returned it to its place in the bottom of the sack, arose, took up the extra rug, shook it out, and spread it carefully over the Duke of Dorset.
Then he lay down, at full length by the fire, with the wooden saddle under his head.
The sun was in the sky when the Duke awoke. He had slept eight hours under the narcotics of the forest. He arose and stretched his limbs. The packing cases were set in order; the fire was kindled; the mule stood close beside him, eating her breakfast. The food seemed to be bits of the yellow scone which the mountaineer had offered yesterday to the Duke. The circuit rider sat smoking by the fire; he got up uneasily, stood a moment, kneading his fingers, and moving the broken fern leaves into a heap with the edge of his boot sole. Then he spoke, hesitating and with apology:
"I guess there hain't no breakfast. There war some yaller biscuits, but I give'em to Jezebel."
The Duke instantly remembered that sign laid down in the Hebrew Scriptures, by which one, observing the righteous man, traveling with his beast, should know him. He laughed and nodded to the mule.
"The lady, by all means," he said. Then he threw back his shoulders, filled his lungs with the good pungent air, and looked up at the tree tops. He was not intending to go hungry if the forest could provide a breakfast. But the wood pigeon had departed while the Duke lay below, sleeping on his back. Only the dapper woodpecker remained, hopping about on a dead fir tree, mottled with the sun, his head cocked, looking for a place to drill.
The Duke turned from the forest to the river. The sun lay upon it; the amber water slipped by, gurgling among the reeds, in long wrinkles, over the wide shallow, to a pool studded with huge stones, where it lay for a moment sunning, in a gentle eddy. The Duke followed along the bank to the pool. Out in the dark water beyond him, under the shelter of the great bowlders, fish were moving or lay in vague outline like shadows thrown into the water. Safe here, idling in their house, acquainted with no peril save that of the otter swimming in the night, or the fishhawk descending in the sun. The Duke stood for some moments looking out into the pool, then he returned to the mountaineer who sat smoking by the fire.
"Have you a stout knife?" he said.
The man arose, took a clasp knife out of his pocket, handed it to the Duke, and returned to his place against the spruce tree, and his cob pipe, glowing with a coal. The Duke went out into the forest, cut a sapling, some eight feet long, trimmed it, and pared it even at the butt. Then he cut a square trench along the sapling, from the butt upward, three inches long and a quarter inch in depth. He cut also narrow rings in the bark around the sapling over the trench. Then he went back to the mountaineer, returned the knife, and put his second query.
"Have you a bit of string!"
The man put out his hand, without a word, drew the gunny sack over to him, unraveled the coarse threads around the top of it, wet them in his mouth, rolled them between his fingers, and handed them to the Duke. Then he flipped a hot ember deftly into his cooling pipe, and leaned back again, silently, into his place against the spruce tree.
The Duke took a little knife out of his waistcoat pocket, opened its larger blade, and set the handle of it into the trench which he had cut into the sapling, forced it firmly in, and bound it tightly with the bits of hemp. Then he went with the pole in his hand, down the bank of the river to the pool. He laid it here on the bracken and stripped to the skin. The mountaineer, pulling slowly at his pipe, bareheaded, the long gray hair straggling over his face, watched every movement of the Duke with deep and consuming interest.
When the Duke stood naked, as the first man in the Garden, he took the sapling in his teeth, lowered himself into the water, and swam with long noiseless strokes out to a great rock standing in the middle waters of the pool—a rock, flat, smooth as a table, and covered with gray lichen, as with a frost of silver. He drew himself noiselessly up out of the water, crawled along the level surface of the rock, and stretched himself at full length, with his face peering over the lower border of it. Then he put his right arm slowly out with the pole grasped above the middle. The lichen, heated by the sun, was warm. The light descended into the dark pool as into a vat of amber. The Duke lay stretched out in the sun, his lithe, powerful body glistening with drops of water, his left arm doubled under his chest, his right, bronzed, sinewy, the muscles set like steel, raised above the dark water.
The mountaineer watched from his place against the spruce tree, his chin lifted, his pipe, turned over on its elder stem, going out. The mule behind him, nosing the bracken for lost fragments of bread, made the only sound rising in the forest. Suddenly the Duke's arm descended; the eddy below the great rock boiled; something floundered across the deep water of the pool, a faint stain of crimson rising to the amber surface. The Duke arose, took his weapon by the end, and threw it, like a harpoon, across the pool to the bank, where it stood fixed upright in the bracken, quivering, the knife blade glittering in the sun. Then he disappeared head first into the pool, and a moment later came ashore with a three-pound trout, gaping with a wound, two inches deep, descending behind the gills downward through the spine.
Thus the Duke got his breakfast as the savage of the Yukon gets it; as the snub-nosed oriental-eyed Indian of the Pacific Coast to this day, on occasion, gets it. And he cooked it, as the Indian cooks his salmon, grilled on a flat stone before a heap of embers.
When the feast was ended, the Duke of Dorset roped the pack to the mule, and they forded the river, wading through the black water to their middle. They pushed through a huckleberry thicket and climbed the shoulder of the mountain on an old trail, hardly to be followed; made, doubtless, by the deer and the red Indian. For two hours they climbed the mountain, laboriously, on this lost trail, and then, abruptly passing around the huge, gnarled trunk of a gigantic fir, they came out on the summit; and the Duke of Dorset stopped motionless, in his tracks, like a man come suddenly by some enchantment into a land of wonders.
Below him, rimmed in by mountains, rising one above the other into haze, threaded by a river, lay the work surely of those palace builders of Arabia, imprisoned in copper pots under the stamp of Solomon. Two hundred feet below him on a vast terrace stood a château of cream-colored stone, roofed with red tile; carved beautifully around the doors and windows; stretching across the whole terrace, with a huge door under an arch set in a square tower. It was faced with delicate spires, and to the left a second tower arose, circular, huge, with a flat roof, and long windows rising unevenly as on the turn of some vast stairway; then it stretched away on either side, with arches, balustrades, sweeps of bare wall, great windows set in carving and mounted with fretwork, to low square towers, flanking massively the ends.
The whole of it, in spite of its walls, its massive arches, its towers—by some touch of architectural harmony, by some trick of grouping, by some genius moving in the hand that traced the outline of it thus fantastically against the sky—seemed a thing airy and illusive, as though raised here on the instant by some fairy magic. From the château, stretching level as a floor to the foot of the bluff on which the Duke stood, lay a square of velvet turf, framed rigidly in a white road. To the east of this court, behind the château, a park descended, sloping to the river; to the south, rigid and formal against a wall of yellow stone, long terraces lay, one below the other, each a formal garden perfect in detail to the slightest fragment of color. The first lying against the wall was severe in outline, white as though paved with quartz, flanked at either end with a square of that exquisite velvet turf and lying between were three pools floating with water flowers. Against the wall, at regular intervals, was, here and there, a marble figure standing in a niche, separated by a green sheared hedge, banking the wall to its yellow coping. The second terrace was a formal Italian garden after the ancient villas of the Campagna. The third, an Egyptian garden, walled with pale-green tile. And thus, varied and beautiful, the terraces descended to the valley. Whatever garden any people, laboriously, through long generations, had made in form and color beautiful to the eye, was here reproduced with minute and endless patience.
Beyond, stretching westward and to the south, were green fields, meadows, pastures, reaching to the shoulders of the mountains. Far down the valley out of these mountains the great road leading from the sea emerged, wound through the meadow land, ascended west of the terraces, from which it was separated by a wall, and entered the court through bronze gates swinging to stone pillars. These pillars were surmounted by a figure having the face and bust of a woman and the body of a monster—such a figure as the Latin sculptors have sometimes called "La Chimera."
Eastward, the lands were forests; north, the rising lands were orchards, vineyards, formal trees, shrubs, vines. And the whole of it rimmed in by the far-off hazy, mysterious mountains fading into the sky line, like some blue wall of the world. It was such a thing as that jinn—slave of the lamp—might have lifted out of the baked earth of Arabia.
The mountaineer, standing beside the Duke of Dorset, broke the first silence.
"Hit air Childers agin God Almighty," he said, "hit air all made," and he pointed with his big finger directly down the ridge on which they stood.
The Duke, following the finger, realized that the whole thing was indeed made. The entire shoulder of the mountain, on which they now stood, had been cut down, leveled and formed into these great terraces. The face of this vast cut fell sheer below him. It was walled up almost to his feet with that yellow stone—a vast perpendicular wall festooned with vines.
The mountaineer, having spoken this word of explanation, turned back to his mule, cut the rope, and began to take down the leather boxes. The Duke remained striving to comprehend the magnitude of this labor—a labor colossal and appalling. A mountain pared down, a wilderness parked, graded, landscaped, and no mark of it visible to the eye. Human cleverness, patient, tireless, bad obscured here every trace of this vast labor as beautifully, as subtly, as the wilderness back yonder bad adorned and bidden the road cut through her dominions to the sea. The whole estate lay before him, unreal, like the work of a magician—made by no stroke of the pick, no clatter of the hammer. Those two strange, impressive, sinister figures, mounted on the stone posts, where the road entered the court, looking out over this enchantment, were mysteriously suggestive. This scene, lying before him in the sun, was some illusion of the fancy, some mirage, some chimera.
The Duke of Dorset was awakened from this reverie by the mountaineer speaking behind him.
"I guess I'll be a-movin' along," he said, "you'll find somebody down there to pack in your traps."
The Duke turned, thrusting his hand into his pocket, but the band remained there when his eyes rested on the circuit rider's face. The man's big stooping body was straight now, his features firm and composed, his head set with a certain dignity on his shoulders.
"No, stranger," he said, "me an' Jezebel works fur God Almighty, an' we don't take pay."
The Duke of Dorset did then what he would have done on the continent of Europe, in the presence of such a priest; he offered money to adorn his church, to aid his poor; but the circuit rider put back the hand.
"No," he said, "as I read hit in the Good Book, God Almighty don't ker fur gewgaws, an' the poor man hain't helped much by a dollar that he don't work fur." Then he put out his hand like one parting with an equal.
The Duke of Dorset dropped the money into his pocket, and took the big callous hand firmly in his own.
"My friend," he said, "you have guided me across the mountains from the sea, transported my luggage, and provided me with food. I am, therefore, in your debt. Is it quite fair to leave me under this obligation?"
The mountaineer was visibly embarrassed, his feet shifted uneasily, his face grew thoughtful.
"Well," he said, "if you feel that away about this air little lift, that me an' Jezebel give you, why, jist pass it on to the next man that you find a settin' by the road, with more'n he kin pack."
Then he shook the Duke's hand as a bear might have done, slipped the rope bridle again into the crook of his arm, and set out northward along the ridge, with the mule following at his heels and the sack swaying on his shoulder.
The Duke stood motionless watching the man until he disappeared in among the boles of the fir trees, then he turned toward the château. At the brink of the sheer wall he found a flight of steps descending, and leaving his luggage where the mountaineer had piled it, he went slowly down, hidden among the vines.