Wayland came to himself hurled back a hundred feet knocked flat by an invisible blow.  The old frontiersman lay clinging to a prone trunk spitting blood and gasping for air.  The animals were scrambling to their feet saddles twisted, bridles broken.

“‘Twas the concussion of the air!  A’m not hurt, not a feather o’ my head hurt!  A’ve seen it before in the Rockies!  Look back,” he panted.

When the Ranger turned, the clouds of dust were settling, though the earth still rocked.  A hundred feet of snow lay across the trail in a wall.  Huge trees had been torn from the roots, sucked in, twisted and torted like straws.

“Look,” reiterated the old frontiersman.

Against the rock trail on the other side of the snow slide, three men stood waving frantically.  From the time the falling cornice of snow had tossed up in a puff of smoke ten miles away to the fell stroke of the titanic leveller of the ages—­not ten seconds had passed.  It would have been an even bet that the men on the other side had been caught in the middle of their sentences, in the middle of their signalling.  As for the injured man and his companion—­Wayland looked down the mountain slope.  The snow slide had shot to the bottom and gone quarter way up the other side.

“’Twill be safer now to cross to the other side!  We can go up above the snow slide and cross by the bare rocks!”

But Wayland was unheeding.  What was it about snow flakes massing to a momentum that bevelled the granite and rolled away the rocks for the resurrection to a new life?  Would it be so some day with the Nation?  Would the quiet workers, the pure thinkers, the faithful citizens mass some day to sweep away the lawlessness, the outrage, the crime, the treachery, the trickery, the shame, the sham of self-government’s failures; to roll away the stone for the resurrection to a new Democracy?  ‘High brows,’ ‘dreamers,’ ‘ghost walkers,’ ‘barkers,’ ‘biters,’ ‘muck-rakers!’ Oh, he knew the choice names that lawless greed cast at such as he; but a greater than he had said something about the meek and the inheritance of the earth; and there lay the work of the snow flake across the trail.

“I suppose,” he remarked absently, “it’s our duty to go down and dig those dead duffers out.”

“Nothing o’ the kind.  They’ll keep cold storage till the crack o’ doom, and after that ’tis an ice pack they’ll need.  The snow’s too clean a grave for the likes o’ them!  The Lord has hewn out a path through the sea!  Sound the loud timbrel and on!”

CHAPTER XV

THE DESERT

Four days had passed since they stood on the edge of the snow slide and gazed across at three outlaws on the far side under the crag waving frantically where their belated comrades had been buried under the avalanche.  When the outlaw drovers had turned and galloped into the blue slashed gully of the opposite mountain, the Ranger had observed that their only remaining pack horse was white, an old dappled white running with a limp.