“This is what we heard last night!  See, Wayland, the snow up there has been breakin’!  It sags!  Got its fore feet forward for a race down one of these days!”

Both men became aware of something portentous and heavy in the silence:  it was mid-day; but there was no noon-time shout of disimprisoned waters.  Not a crossbill, not a jay, neither eagle nor hawk, showed against the azure fields of sky and snow.  A little riffle as of waiting fluttered through the grasses and leaves.  Wayland was looking with dumb amazement at the great field of laurel in bloom across the slope; three or four miles of it, leaves of green wax in the sun, flowers passion pale, motionless, waiting; what was it he missed?  The insect life; there were neither butterflies nor bees rifling the fields of honey bloom; the flowers, acres and acres of them, stood passion pale, motionless waiting—­waiting what?  Then, there was a singing in his ears, a weird strange undertone to the hush of the forest behind them.  His breath came heavy.  The old man was speaking in a muffled voice.

“See, boy, there are three men on the other side!  They are signalling.”

Wayland came alive out of his strange trance.

“It isn’t to us they are signalling.  Move back quick, out of sight, sir; see! there’s a man half way across, the fellow in the yellow slicker!  There’s some one on foot holding him in his saddle!  What ever are they waving so frantically for?”

Involuntarily, both men had wheeled the ponies back in the screen of trees, when the old man cried out:  “What in blazes ails your mule?”

The little animal had jumped sideways.

“Get back, quick! for God’s sake, Wayland!  A know the signs from the Canadian Rockies.  It isn’t us they are signalling.  It’s the snow; it’s coming, Wayland!”

The words were smothered by a tremor grinding through the hollow hush.  There was a split, a splintering, a dull boom of titanic weight falling, miles away.  They saw the puff of snow dust fly up in a toss of mist over the face of the distant upper crags.  Then, a grinding tore the earth; something white glistening viscous crumpled—­coiled with untellable furious speed, shaggy and formless, out from the upper peaks—­coiled and writhed out like a giant python in titanic torture.  For an instant, for less than the fraction of an instant, it poised and coiled and looped as a great white snake in and out among the far upper meadows:  then ruptured free with ear splitting wrench.  The air was ripped to tatters.  The forest, the rock wall, the foundations of the universe gave way; the huge hemlocks were tossing and bending like feathers; the upper forests toppled and spilled like an inverted matchbox.  Then the whole world, earth, air, rocks, forest, shot down in a blinding rush, in a viscous torrent of titanic fury.  The surface of the mountain crumpled up and peeled in a sliding mass.