The Master-Knot of Human Fate | Page 2

immense gateway of stone. Here the mountain had been
torn asunder, and two palisades of gray-green rock rose grim and
terrible for hundreds of feet, while between them, dashing over
boulders and trees and the impedimenta of ages, a little stream rushed
along in the eternal night at their base. Far away to the west, range
upon range piled themselves against the intense blue sky. Beyond a
rustic gate, standing across the path that narrowed to a few feet before
the wall of stone, a park, sparkling and green in the sunlight, was
visible. They stopped and regarded the two gateways,--one the work of
nature, the other the feeble counterfeit of man,--and then swinging open
the creaking wooden affair, passed into the peaceful valley. A few
yards away stood a small log cabin, but the chimney was smokeless,
and though the chickens clucked in the yard, and a collie lay on the
doorstep, it seemed desolate and deserted.
Passing along an almost invisible trail, they found themselves in the
wildest and most remote part of that wild and remote region. They saw
a few stray animals, but no human beings. This was one of the few
places where mining was not a universal pursuit, and it was too early to
do much in the few mines that did exist. There are entire sections in the

Rockies that are deserted for more than half the year, and this was one
of them. That day there was no one at the signal station. The keeper had
gone down to the valley for fresh stores, and to learn something of the
terrific disturbances that were said to be threatening the entire Eastern
coast with annihilation. Perhaps the owners of the log cabin had made a
similar pilgrimage.
The scene was flooded with moonlight when the travellers passed the
gate on their homeward way, and sat down on a boulder a few yards
without the frowning portal. The night was cold, and the woman had
put on her jacket, and sunk her numbed fingers in its pockets. In spite
of her weariness she was troubled and restless, and turning looked first
at the beetling crags back of them, then away over the plain at the
twinkling lights of the town below. They heard indistinctly the sounds
of bells ringing wildly, and overhead flocks of birds circled and called
with shrill, uncanny voices. Yet the moonlight was so bright that they
saw each other as plainly as if it were day, and its placid radiance
seemed strangely at variance with the disturbed wild-fowl, and certain
weird and fitful sounds that seemed to be sighed forth from the bosom
of the earth.
"It is a pity," she said, "that we cannot pass through this gateway into
paradise without descending to earth again."
"I don't believe you are half as tired of life as you say," he answered
with an impatient movement of his head. "You may not shrink from
death as I do, or enjoy life so keenly, but isn't it a good thing to be alive
to-night? Isn't it fine to be a mile or so above the rest of humanity and
the deadly conventionalities? Aren't you glad you came?"
She did not answer, but presently said dreamily, "Suppose that plain
was the sea."
"It isn't hard to suppose," he answered. "I have seen the Pacific when it
looked just so."
"Oh, no," she said quickly. "Nothing is like the sea but itself. You will
never persuade me that I love the mountains so well. And the

plains,--just imagine if all that gray green silver were gray blue, with
here and there a gathering crest of foam, racing to break in spray about
these mountains--"
"Why, look," he said, drawing her a little to one side, "there is your
liquid blue, with its white crest moving toward us. Could the real sea
look more wonderful than that? It is blotting out everything. Now it
recedes,--was it not real?"
She started to her feet. "This is a very strange night," she said
irrelevantly, in a rather strained voice. "Listen,--and see how many
birds are flying about us; I never saw them fly so at night. What does it
mean?"
They stood together, looking at each other with startled faces. The
whole mountain, all the mountains, seemed to be alive and trembling
under them. Overhead thousands of birds wheeled and screamed with
terror in their mingled outcries. The little creeping things scuttled away
up the mountain. The silver-blue wave widened and spread over the
plain from north to south, and the air was full of a dull, terrible roar, as
if the fountains of the great deep had broken up, and a thousand
white-crested waves rushed toward the hapless city before them. They
covered it, and with a wild