The old man had been like the storm wind of the mountains hurling off the dead leaves of thought.  Wayland paused in his pacing.  The opal peak emerged from pearl gray cloud wrack; a silver cross, translucent, unreal, luminous, a thing of dreams winged with silver light beneath a solitary star, eternal as God.  And the night wind through the pines, that had sounded so doleful but a moment before, became the jubilant clicking of countless castanets, the castanets of the long pine needles, sounding a triumphant chant to the touch of invisible hands.

Wayland stopped pacing.  He almost stopped thinking.  The consciousness, the realizing sense of her presence, of her touch, of a something more than her touch, of her being enveloping his in some ethereal fire, went over the Ranger in fiercely tender flood tides; this time, not in tumultuous confused desire, but in waves of strength, in visions from which the mists had vanished, daring that laughed with gladness over life.  There were no longer two Waylands in conflict, with one sneering and looking on.  “A house divided against itself shall fall.”  There was only one, with the blood of mothers in his veins, whelmed by a consciousness that reached back far as the consciousness of the race.  Somehow, his simple manhood, the inheritance in his blood of men and women, who had loved, fused the conflict of his nature to a singleness of purpose and won peace now.

What he said was:  “Come on, my friend, the enemy!  I’m right here on the job; nailed, you bet, long as she does it!  Just to come alive is worth being crucified.”

“Hullo,” bawled a towsled head through the cabin window.  “Aren’t you going to turn in?  It’s exactly twelve o’clock!  Darn it all!  Don’t make a sleep-walking Lady Macbeth tragedy out of it!  Chuck the bally thing and come on down to the Valley!  Why do you waste your life pretending you are Providence steering the whole earth?  Chuck it, Dickie!  If you were in town, I’d give you a cocktail!  Got anything up here?”

Wayland went to sleep to dream one of those dreams that envelop day with rain-bow mist.  He dreamed that the amethyst gates of the sun had swung ajar flooding life with countless charioteers each carrying a golden spear, and as they advanced over the clouds to earth, all the little purple heather bells that had hung their heads during the night to keep out the dew, all the waxy chalices of the winter-greens pale and faint with passion, all the bells nodding to the wind, began ringing—­ringing ten thousand golden bells; and the painter’s brush, multicolored dazzling knee-deep in the Alpine meadows, flaunted countless torches of carmine flame to welcome back the day.  Then, suddenly, it wasn’t a sound of bells at all.  It was her voice, her voice with the golden note and the liquid break that came when he had surprised Love in her eyes; and it wasn’t the warmth of the Sun’s fan-shaped shafts at all; it was the warmth of her lips in the face of the picture she had promised—­the face above “the Warrior.”  When he awakened, a sprig of everlasting that he had stuck in the band of his Alpine hat had blown across his face.