The Fire Flower. Jackson Gregory
millions of branches, not unlike the vague murmur in a sea shell. The peak itself might have been the altar of the god of silence.
East, west, south, whence he had come, Sheldon saw ridge on ridge, peak after peak, No-Luck Land running away until, with other ridges and peaks, it melted into the sky-line.
Looking north, and almost at his feet, the mountainside fell away precipitously. He estimated that he was at an altitude not less than eleven thousand feet. There was snow here, plenty of it, thawing so slowly that not nearly all of it would be gone when the winter came again.
Below him, in the tumbled boulders, were pockets of snow, with bare spaces, and the hardy mountain flowers in the shallow soil. Down he looked and down, until it seemed as though the steep-sided mountains fell away many thousands of dizzy feet. And there below was the wide valley, all one edge of it meadow-land, all the other edge given over to a mighty forest, and at the jagged line lying between wood and field a little lake, calm and blue, with white rocks along the farther rim.
On all sides of the valley lay the sheer mountains, shutting it in so that a man might look down and see the beauties beneath him and yet hesitate to descend, thinking of the difficulties of getting both in and out.
Sheldon had not forgotten the imprint of the bare foot. Nor was he ready to give up the search he had begun, there being no little stubbornness in the man’s nature.
But he stared long down into the valley before him, thinking of the solitude to be found there; the game to be hunted if a man sought game; thinking that some time he would make his way down yonder, joying in the thought that his foot would be the first for years, perhaps generations or even centuries, to travel there. Now, however, he would turn back to where Buck waited; seek the pass that must lead out, and learn, if it was fated that he should know, who had made the tracks at the crossing.
His eyes, sweeping now across the field of tumbled rocks which topped the ridge at the base of his peak, were arrested by a flat piece of granite resting on top of a boulder which rose conspicuously above its neighbors.
A monument!
Here, where only a second ago he had told himself that perhaps no other human foot than his own had come! The old sign of a man-made trail, the sign to be read from afar, to last on into eternity. For the shrieking winds of winter and the racing snows do not budge the flat rock laid carefully upon flat-topped stone.
Was he tricking himself? Had nature, in some one of her mad moods, done this trick? He strode over to it swiftly, sliding down the side of the slope up which he had clambered, making his way by leaps and bounds from rock to rock.
The monument was man-made.
Nature doesn’t go out of her way, as some man had done, to get a block of granite, carry it a hundred yards up-hill, and place it upon a rock of another kind and shade where it can be the more conspicuous.
One monument calls for another in a trackless field of stone. In a moment, farther along the ridge, he found the second monument. He hurried to it. Yonder, lower on the slope, was the third; a hundred yards farther on, the fourth!
He got the trend of the trail now, for it curved only a bit, and they ran straight, straight toward the eastern rim of the valley lying far below him. And the other way, the trail ran back toward the cañon from which he had climbed. A trail here, in the very innermost heart of the Sasnokee-keewan, where men said there were no trails!
Eagerly he turned back toward the cañon. Monument after monument he found, leading cunningly between giant boulders, under cliffs, down a little, upward a little, down again, slowly, gradually seeking the lower altitude. Again and again Sheldon lost the way, which had but rock set on rock to indicate it; but always, going back, he picked it up again.
There were a dozen monuments to show the way before he came down into the meadow a mile above the spot where he had left Buck. And here also, at the base of the slope fully two hundred yards from the willows of the creek, he found a fresh, green willow-rod. It had been dropped here not more than a few hours ago, for the white wood where the bark had been torn away was not dried out. A bit of the bark itself he could tie into a knot without breaking it. And the stick had been cut with a sharp knife, the smooth end showing how one stroke had cut evenly through the half-inch branch.
“My wild man came this way,” was Sheldon’s eager thought. “He knew the trail over the mountain, and has gone on ahead. And that knife of his—”
He shuddered in spite of himself, and again cursed himself for getting what he called “nerves.” But he thought that it was a fair bet that same knife had been driven into the backs of at least two men.
He went back for his horse, walking swiftly. Three hours had slipped away since noon. But he told himself that he was not “burning daylight.” He had found a way over the mountain, a way he believed his horse could go with him. And if luck was good, he’d camp to-night in the valley down into which he had looked from the peak.
And somewhere, far ahead of him, perhaps not a thousand feet away, watching him from behind some tree or rock, was his “wild man!” He was beginning to be certain that it was a man, a little fellow, dwarfed in body and mind and soul, and yet—
And yet the track might have been that of a boy of ten, or of a woman. Right then he swore that he was going to find out whose track that was before he turned his back on the Sasnokee-keewan.
“I’d never be able to get it out of my head if I lived to be a thousand years old if I didn’t get a look at the thing,” he assured himself. “Thank God it’s early in the season.”
When he stopped to rest, he already had the habit of keeping his back to a tree.
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