Despairs Last Journey | Page 2

giant faces. One height, with a supernal leap, had risen from the highest, and stood poised a mile aloft, as if it were a feat to stand so for a second, with a craggy head cut out of the sheet of blue. Mountain torrents, too far away to bring the merest murmur to the ear, spun and plaited their quivering ropes of silver wire. The shadows in the clefts of near hills were like purple wine in a glass. Above and beyond they were bloomed like an ungathered plum. The giant firs looked like orderly pin-rows of decreasing size for half a mile along the climbing heights. Before they reached the snow-line they seemed as smooth as the smallest moss that grows.
The passenger regarded none of these things, but stared thoughtfully at the platform at his feet. He drew a cigarette from amongst a loose handful in a waistcoat pocket, struck a lucifer match upon his thigh, and smoked absently for a minute or so. Then he took the portmanteau in one hand and the brown bag in the other, and, leaving the railway platform, crossed the single line, and made a plunging, careless scramble through a narrow belt of undergrowth. In a minute or less he came upon a moss-grown way cut through the wood along the side of the mountain--the old Cariboo Track men used before the days of the railway. Weighted as he was, he found it warm work here, shut in from the cool breezes of the mountains and yet exposed to the rays of the mid-day sun. He wrestled along, however, for some quarter of a mile, and, reaching a small wooden bridge which crossed a runnel of clear water, set his burden down and looked about him, mopping his brow with a handkerchief.
'This will do, I fancy,' he said aloud, and then began to undress.
He stripped to socks, drawers, and vest before opening the brown bag, from which he took an old black felt hat, a shirt of gray patternless flannel, coat and trousers of gray tweed, a belt of leather, and a pair of mountain boots. Having attired himself in these things, he lit another cigarette, and smoked broodingly until it was finished. Then he walked back to the railside shanty, found the canvas bale, and slowly and with great exertion lugged it down the slope and along the trail. He panted and perspired at this task; for though he was sturdily set, and large of limb and stature, he was obviously unused to that kind of work, and by the time it was over he was fain to throw himself upon the moss and rest for a full half-hour. Being rested, he rolled over, and, stretching out a hand towards the discarded frock-coat, drew from its inner pocket a ball of Canadian and American notes, crushed and tangled together like papers of no value. He smoothed them out, flattening them upon his knee one by one, and, having counted them over, rolled them up tidily, and thrust them to the bottom of the brown bag. Next, he began to untie the cords which fastened the canvas bale, muttering 'Damn the thing!' at intervals, as the knots refused to yield to his unskilful handling. Finally, when the work was two-thirds done, he made search for a pen-knife, and, having found it, severed the remaining knots, and threw the cords away into the runnel.
'That's emblematic,' he said. 'Anything's emblematic if you're on the look-out for emblems.'
The canvas bale, being unrolled, displayed a bundle of gray blankets; a tent-pole, jointed like a fishing-rod, and in three pieces; an axe; a leather gun-case; a small gridiron; a small frying-pan; a tin quart pot, close-packed with loose cartridges; and a pair of folding trestles and a folding board for the construction of a little table. The canvas in which all these things had been packed afforded material for a tent, and the Solitary, with a seeming custom and alertness which no man would have argued from his aspect of an hour ago, began to set up his abiding-place in the narrow natural clearing he had chosen.
In a while everything was tidy and ship-shape, and when he had made a fire, and had constructed a tripod of branches from which to hang the quart pot, newly filled with water from the sparkling runnel near at hand, the lonely man sat down and smoked again, letting his eyes rove here and there, and seeming to scan the scene before him with a dreamy interest. The pot boiled over, and the hissing of the wet embers awoke him from his contemplations. The brown portmanteau, being opened, proved to be filled with packets of provisions of various kinds. He made tea, broke into a tin of sardines and a packet of