drinking, and drinking yet again, of life and love and blessedness from the fount of human lips; of the seal that should be the seal to service, not to self; of the gates ajar to a new life like the notch of sky where the rocks of the Pass opened portals to the blue valley.  Would he have dreamed less joyously if he had known that the portals of the Pass led to the avalanche and the desert and the alkali death?  Who shall say that love did not pay the toll?  And in him rioted the savagery of the fighter who wanted to seize his foe by the throat.

CHAPTER XIV

ON THE GAME TRAIL

The dull boom of a snow-cornice tumbling over some high cliff on the far side of the lake awakened the Ranger to the chill darkness of mountain night just before dawn.  The moon had sunk behind the sky-line of the peaks; and the little lake laving among the reeds lay inky in the shadow of the heavy mist.

Wayland listened.  The deep breathing of the horses round the ashes of the mosquito smudge guided him across to saddles.  He placed saddles, pack trees and provisions on the raft.  Then, he wakened the old man and pulled the grunting horses to their feet.  A little riffle, half wind, half light, stirred the lake mist, revealing glare patches of snow reflection in the water.

“Hoh! man, but y’r old peaks have a nip in the air at three in the mornin’!” Matthews came down to the raft chaffing his hands.  “That’s a job worthy a woodsman,” he observed, holding the halter reins while the Ranger got a couple of long poles.

A dozen saplings had been mortised to a couple of cottonwoods.

“They may take water; but they’ll not sink; and they’ll not tip,” declared Wayland.

Reeds and willows had been used in place of nails.  Two or three of the logs were spliced to grip the end cottonwoods firmly.  The two men stepped on the raft.

“Why didn’t you go round the upper end?”

“Ice,” answered Wayland.

“Too deep for poling in the middle?” asked Matthews.

“That’s why I’m going to creep along shore.”

“It’ull keep y’ in the shadows.”

With a prod of his pole, Wayland shoved off, and the frontiersman lengthened out the leading lines for the horses.  The Ranger smiled whimsically to find the reverse side of Holy Cross peak, up-side down in the water, and he set to figuring out what sort of triangular lines thought-waves must follow to connect his thought of that peak etched in the bottom of the lake with her thought on the other side of a peak up in the sky.

“Steady, man!  Slow up!  There’s a fallen tree with its rump stuck ashore!  A’ don’t want to warp ye in by snaggin’ round; an’ that mule brute is thinkin’ o’ sittin’ down.”

The bronchos had plunged to the cold dip with deep grunts, but the mule braced his legs and brayed at the morning.  The frontiersman said things between set teeth that might have been objurgations to the soul of Satan or the race of mules.  Wayland shoved on the pole.  The mule pulled.  The logs of the raft began to creak.  “Look out, sir, we’re splitting!  Let that doggon brute go—­”