IN THE HOLLOW OF THE STORM
Haig arrived at timber line about an hour before nightfall. On the
long trail he had considered thoroughly all the chances of his case,
and was prepared to undergo delays and disappointments. He knew
Thunder Mountain. Even without reckoning on storms (and the vapors
were at that moment settling down on the frowning battlement), it were
foolhardiness, or worse, to attempt the passage of the mountain in the
night. Then he remembered the shallow cave that he had noticed on his
previous visit to the summit; and his plans were made.
He gathered an armful of dry sticks and shreds of bark, climbed the
treacherous slope as Marion did some hours later, and settled himself
in the half-shelter of the cave to await the morning. A rasher of
bacon, a slice of bread, and a pipe of tobacco refreshed him; and he
rolled himself in his blankets, and went to sleep. Like Marion in the
"spare bedroom" far below, he was awakened in the night by the savage
hammerings of the storm. The very rocks beneath him seemed to be
jarred by that cannonade; the wind, howling around the cliff,
threatened to drag him out of his cave; and the rain fell in torrents
on the platform, almost flooding his stone bed. But he turned over in
his blankets, and hoped the mountain would "keep it up" all night.
Even Sunnysides would be halted by a storm like that.
He arose at the first sign of dawn, hurried through his scant and
salty breakfast, quenched his thirst with rain water scooped out of
depressions in the rock, and started on. Knowing the trail at this
point, he rode straight out along the platform, and came in half a
minute to the spot where the wall of rock was broken down into a
clutter of debris, in width some forty feet. Up through this litter of
disintegrated granite the trail lurched with many twists and turns,
and emerged at last upon one of the lower levels of the summit.
Trixy was winded, and for a moment Haig rested her, while he surveyed
the scene. And in the thrill of that moment, facing the undertaking in
which he had once failed, he all but forgot Sunnysides. The wind was
low, and scarcely more difficult to meet than a stiff blow in the
Park; but aside from that he saw little encouraging in the prospect.
Behind him, it was true, the forests and all the hills and valleys lay
clear in the morning light, with just a thin mist clinging in the
gulches; and around him on all sides but one the sharp peaks stood up
shining white in the first rays of the sun. But in front of him gray
vapors, not yet dense enough to be described as clouds, came swirling
and tumbling toward him across the stone-littered surface of the flat.
Unless the sun should dissipate those vapors--He shrugged his
shoulders, and rode on.
Almost fourteen thousand feet above the level of the sea, the bald
head of Thunder Mountain, stripped as it has been of its ennobling
peak, needs only three or four hundred feet to be as high as the
snow-clad summits on each side. Seen from afar, that bare head
appears to be as flat and smooth as a table, but in reality its entire
area, roughly circular in outline, and something more than three miles
in its largest diameter, is broken up into terraces, into slopes and
hillocks, into hollows and mounds, all strewn with, bowlders and loose
stones, with here and there uprearing rocks of fantastic and
suggestive shapes. There is no life there,--no birds, no conies or
chipmunks that inhabit most high places of these mountains; no
flowers, no grass, no sign of vegetation; nothing but granite. The
trail runs sometimes plainly across level reaches of loose stones,
sometimes over long smooth surfaces of rock, sometimes in and out
among wildernesses of shattered and tumbled fragments of the
mountain's blasted head. At varying intervals, particularly in its
more difficult stages, it is marked by small pyramids of stones, and
by crosses cut crudely in the rock. Care must be taken not to miss one
of these marks; for the trail, in avoiding inaccessible heaps of
granite, goes in places perilously near the edge of the summit, which
falls away in more than one known precipice a thousand feet to the
unknown gulch below.
The wind was cold, and Haig felt that its strength was steadily
increasing, though it yet blew fitfully. He made the second level
without mishap, but was brought to a momentary standstill there by the
fiercer rush of wind on the higher terrace. It seemed strange, at
first thought, that the wind had not blown away the vapors that now
enveloped him; but he saw presently that it was not blowing across
the mountain, but rather in a circular, whirlwind motion that
gradually became more violent. The terrace he now crossed was as
smooth as a floor, and he found his way only by means of the crosses
carved in the rocks beneath his feet. Then the trail dropped
suddenly into a shallow trough; mounted to another field of
crumbled stones; and rose unevenly to a barrier that he remembered
with a pang of chagrin. This was what at the first glance would have
appeared to be a solid and insurmountable wall of rock, perhaps
fifteen feet in height, and stretching away to the very edge of the
plateau at his right, and to a wilderness of granite on the left.
But directly ahead of him the wall was cleft, and there was a
narrow pathway climbing up between two huge rocks that had been
carved by the elements into shapes bearing a fanciful resemblance to
human figures. These were the Twin Sisters.
Here Haig had been caught by a storm that hurled him back defeated;
and he had, moreover, narrowly escaped a worse thing than mere defeat;
for the wind had carried him off the trail, and almost to the brink of
the chasm that yawned some hundred yards away. Now, remembering that
experience, he spurred Trixy forward to take the aperture in the wall
before the wind should suddenly become insupportable; and this time he
was more fortunate. The pony leaped and clambered up the slippery
path, and at the exit was caught by a blast that hurled and pinned
her, as if she had been no heavier than a butterfly, against the base
of the righthand towering figure. For some seconds neither horse nor
man was able to move from that fixed position, where the wind
flattened them against the rock. Then it swerved sharply, flung them
against the other Sister with such force that Haig's leg was stunned
and bruised, and finally released them with a shriek that sounded like
a cry of disappointed rage. Trixy plunged forward with a snort, and
Haig saw that the trail was again plain across another field of
scattered stones.
Now, thrilled by this victory, he urged the pony onward at all
possible speed toward the worst of all the perils of the mountain. The
stone field was succeeded by a series of mounds and hollows, and this
by a second slippery floor; and then he mounted the ridge that
terminated in the Devil's Chair. Here was the highest point attained
by the trail: a flat rock measuring perhaps twenty yards one way, and
a little less the other, lifted high above the surrounding slopes, and
having (hence its name) a huge back formed by the abrupt termination
of the ridge. From the chair the rock dipped in a kind of hollow like
a chute, worn smooth by the winds and rains; and everything that ever
fell into that chute was swallowed by the chasm of unplumbed and
unestimated depth. Sometimes the wind blew up through the chute across
the Devil's Chair; sometimes it blew down through it into the chasm.
It was blowing out when Parker reached the chair, and he was hurled
back down, the slope three times before he acknowledged his defeat; it
was blowing in when the three members of the English party were sucked
down into the chasm.
Haig could have cried aloud the joy that ran through him, when, having
spurred Trixy up the steep ascent to a footing on the Devil's Chair,
he found that almost a perfect calm reigned there, due to some sudden
shift in the currents of the air.
"Quick, Trixy! On!" he cried.
The horse bounded across the platform, slid and stumbled down the
other side, and was up again, leaping forward, and a little to the
left, where there was firmer going over another field of stones. And
now at length, to Haig's relief, the trail bent sharply in toward the
middle of the plateau, and thus away from the peril of the chasms.
But his elation was short-lived. If Thunder Mountain had admitted him
between the Twin Sisters, and spared him at the Devil's Chair, it was
only to hurl upon him its accumulated fury farther on. Engrossed in
the endless difficulties of the trail, he had not observed the
stealthy and insidious change that was taking place in the atmosphere
until it had advanced far toward its climax. The un-looked for calm,
so opportune, was but a pause before an outburst of elemental rage.
The vapors lifted, and hung in still masses a few feet above the
earth. Haig picked his way along in a strange, weird, yellowish light,
in a stillness that was all the more impressive by contrast with the
recent howling and hammering of the wind. There was not a faintest
puff of air on his cheek, and not a sound except the click of Trixy's
feet among the stones, and his own hurried breathing. All else seemed
to have paused, expectant, waiting.
It did not come as storms come in the valley, or on the plain, or
among the hills; not even as they come in the mountains. It did not
come from north, or east, or west, or south, or from any known
horizon; it had no sensible direction; it was there. Out of the
portentous hush (not into it) there came first a whisper, something
low and malevolent; then a singular moaning sound, incomparably dismal
and hollow and pervasive. Haig moved his head from side to side,
endeavoring to trace it--before, behind, above--he knew not where. The
moaning murmur grew, and still there was no perceptible movement in
the air; it rose whining up, up, up the scale until at last it was a
shrill, demoniacal shriek. And then, out of the darkening mists, it
leaped upon him.
In this whirling, wicked, wondrous thing there was no orderly and
recognizable succession of phenomena, such as wind and lightning and
rain. These came all in one swoop, all in one frightful blend. It was
black, and it was bright. The lightning came not from the sky,
discharging its bolts to earth; it was on the very surface of the
plateau. It flamed and crackled on uplifted rocks; it ran hissing like
fiery serpents among the scattered stones; it buzzed and exploded in
the very face of Haig, and under the pony's belly. If he had been
caught in a burning storehouse of fireworks--rockets, Roman candles,
pinwheels, and all the ingenious products of the pyrotechnician--the
experience might have been like this, only a thousand times less
terrifying. He dodged and ducked, and threw up his hands to shield his
face, expecting instantly that one of those exploding things would
make an end of him.
Then there were other horrors to be endured. The din became
incessant. Simultaneous with the hiss and crackle and crack of the
lightning there was a continuous deafening detonation in the air
above him, crash on crash and roar on roar. The terrors of the
first few seconds had been chiefly those felt and heard. But the
wind had steadily increased in violence. It did not blow against him,
bowling him over, but whirled around him with a speed that was every
instant accelerated. He felt that he had no weight. He seemed
about to be lifted into the vortex of the storm, to be flung far
out into space.
"Down, girl! Down!" he tried to shout.
But there was no sound from his lips. He felt the pony stiffening
under him, bracing herself stiff-legged on the stones; and he knew
that she shared his fear. And all this time the rain beat down upon
him, in lead-like sheets, with intermittent bombardments of
hailstones. It occurred to him to wonder dully which would win--the
wind that sought to whirl him up into the sky, or the rain that was
for beating him to earth, or the lightning that would burn him to
cinders. Then thought left him, and his last impression was of being
torn limb from limb, and atom from atom, in excruciating pain.
He was roused at length to the consciousness of having been lifted and
hurled; and found himself prostrate on the ground, face downward, with
the rain flooding him. Trixy lay at his side, flat like himself, her
head stretched out among the stones. They seemed to lie in a vacuum,
in the very hollow of the storm. Around them the clatter, the clang
and the uproar were even more terrifying than before because they were
now separated from these noises, no longer a part of them. All was
blackness, shot through with fire. Haig was no more tortured in his
body, except for the sense of being suffocated. He seemed to inhale
raw ozone; the air fairly stank with the odors of decomposition; the
saliva in his mouth had a peculiar pungent and disagreeable taste. He
gasped and fought for breath.
Such reason as was left to him told him that this was the end of all.
At any instant something would flash out of that wall of blackness,
and destroy him with a blow. His spirit rose exultantly to meet and
welcome it; he rejoiced in such a death, slain by the elements, on the
roof of the world, alone, unseen; it was a glorious exit, the finish
he had sought for years on years, his heart's desire. Triumphant and
defiant, he tried to roar back at the thunder, to outscream the wind,
to face the lightning with undimmed eyes.
There came a blinding flash, exceeding in brightness anything he had
yet experienced. But with it, to his amazement, there emerged from the
blackness a vision that brought life back to him with a shocking
thrill. For there, not ten paces distant, was Sunnysides. Only for an
instant; and then all was again obscure. He must have been mistaken.
It was only a figment of fancy, a creation of his tortured brain, a
phenomenon associated with his passing from life to death. And yet he
waited, staring into the smothering void.
Another flash of fire across the black--and Sunnysides! But now the
lightning, as if directed by some intelligence, became again
continuous, its flashes joined in one spouting flame. And in the very
midst of it stood the outlaw in his familiar attitude, with one
forefoot slightly raised, his head high, his nostrils distended, his
dark eyes filled with fire. There had never been anything so bright
and beautiful. His golden hide gleamed with planetary splendor, like
the mythical horses of the sun. This was The Horse, the golden
epiphany of the brute, the answer to all of Haig's fears and
resolutions. And in the very hour of his exit--
Rage rose again within him. Instinctively, for he was scarce capable
of thought, he tried to reach his revolver. But his arms were leaden.
His fingers touched the butt of the weapon, and stopped as if
paralyzed. The horse wavered and danced before his eyes; there was a
culminating detonation; he felt a terrific blow on his head. And he
knew no more.