Джек Лондон
Smoke Bellew
“I can stand it,” he muttered grimly. “Margaret must be married, and it is my fortune, and hers, that you are here. I had little hopes of Four Eyes. McCan was so hopeless I turned him over to a squaw who had lighted her fire twenty seasons. If it hadn’t been you, it would have been an Indian. Libash might have become the father of my grandchildren.”
And then Labiskwee came from her tent to the fire, the wolf-cub in her arms, drawn as by a magnet, to gaze upon the man, in her eyes the love that art had never taught to hide.
* * * * * *
“Listen to me,” said McCan. “The spring thaw is here, an’ the crust is comin’ on the snow. It’s the time to travel, exceptin’ for the spring blizzards in the mountains. I know them. I would run with no less a man than you.”
“But you can’t run,” Smoke contradicted. “You can keep up with no man. Your backbone is limber as thawed marrow. If I run, I run alone. The world fades, and perhaps I shall never run. Caribou meat is very good, and soon will come summer and the salmon.”
Said Snass: “Your partner is dead. My hunters did not kill him. They found the body, frozen in the first of the spring storms in the mountains. No man can escape. When shall we celebrate your marriage?”
And Labiskwee: “I watch you. There is trouble in your eyes, in your face. Oh, I do know all your face. There is a little scar on your neck, just under the ear. When you are happy, the corners of your mouth turn up. When you think sad thoughts they turn down. When you smile there are three and four wrinkles at the corners of your eyes. When you laugh there are six. Sometimes I have almost counted seven. But I cannot count them now. I have never read books. I do not know how to read. But Four Eyes taught me much. My grammar is good. He taught me. And in his own eyes I have seen the trouble of the hunger for the world. He was often hungry for the world. Yet here was good meat, and fish in plenty, and the berries and the roots, and often flour came back for the furs through the Porcupines and the Luskwas. Yet was he hungry for the world. Is the world so good that you, too, are hungry for it? Four Eyes had nothing. But you have me.” She sighed and shook her head. “Four Eyes died still hungry for the world. And if you lived here always would you, too, die hungry for the world? I am afraid I do not know the world. Do you want to run away to the world?”
Smoke could not speak, but by his mouth-corner lines was she convinced.
Minutes of silence passed, in which she visibly struggled, while Smoke cursed himself for the unguessed weakness that enabled him to speak the truth about his hunger for the world while it kept his lips tight on the truth of the existence of the other woman.
Again Labiskwee sighed.
“Very well. I love you more than I fear my father’s anger, and he is more terrible in anger than a mountain storm. You told me what love is. This is the test of love. I shall help you to run away back to the world.”
Smoke awakened softly and without movement. Warm small fingers touched his cheek and slid gently to a pressure on his lips. Fur, with the chill of frost clinging in it, next tingled his skin, and the one word, “Come,” was breathed in his ear. He sat up carefully and listened. The hundreds of wolf-dogs in the camp had lifted their nocturnal song, but under the volume of it, close at hand, he could distinguish the light, regular breathing of Snass.
Labiskwee tugged gently at Smoke’s sleeve, and he knew she wished him to follow. He took his moccasins and German socks in his hand and crept out into the snow in his sleeping moccasins. Beyond the glow from the dying embers of the fire, she indicated to him to put on his outer foot-gear, and while he obeyed, she went back under the fly where Snass slept.
Feeling the hands of his watch Smoke found it was one in the morning. Quite warm it was, he decided, not more than ten below zero. Labiskwee rejoined him and led him on through the dark runways of the sleeping camp. Walk lightly as they could, the frost crunched crisply under their moccasins, but the sound was drowned by the clamor of the dogs, too deep in their howling to snarl at the man and woman who passed.
“Now we can talk,” she said, when the last fire had been left half a mile behind.
And now, in the starlight, facing him, Smoke noted for the first time that her arms were burdened, and, on feeling, discovered she carried his snowshoes, a rifle, two belts of ammunition, and his sleeping-robes.
“I have everything fixed,” she said, with a happy little laugh. “I have been two days making the cache. There is meat, even flour, matches, and skees, which go best on the hard crust and, when they break through, the webs will hold up longer. Oh, I do know snow-travel, and we shall go fast, my lover.”
Smoke checked his speech. That she had been arranging his escape was surprise enough, but that she had planned to go with him was more than he was prepared for. Unable to think immediate action, he gently, one by one, took her burdens from her. He put his arm around her and pressed her close, and still he could not think what to do.
“God is good,” she whispered. “He sent me a lover.”
Yet Smoke was brave enough not to suggest his going alone. And before he spoke again he saw all his memory of the bright world and the sun-lands reel and fade.
“We will go back, Labiskwee,” he said. “You will be my wife, and we shall live always with the Caribou People.”
“No! no!” She shook her head; and her body, in the circle of his arm, resented his proposal. “I know. I have thought much. The hunger for the world would come upon you, and in the long nights it would devour your heart. Four Eyes died of hunger for the world. So would you die. All men from the world hunger for it. And I will not have you die. We will go on across the snow mountains on the south traverse.”
“Dear, listen,” he urged. “We must go back.”
She pressed her mitten against his lips to prevent further speech. “You love me. Say that you love me.”
“I do love you, Labiskwee. You are my wonderful sweetheart.”
Again the mitten was a caressing obstacle to utterance.
“We shall go on to the cache,” she said with decision. “It is three miles from here. Come.”
He held back, and her pull on his arm could not move him. Almost was he tempted to tell her of the other woman beyond the south traverse.
“It would be a great wrong to you to go back,” she said. “I – I am only a wild girl, and I am afraid of the world; but I am more afraid for you. You see, it is as you told me. I love you more than anybody else in the world. I love you more than myself. The Indian language is not a good language. The English language is not a good language. The thoughts in my heart for you, as bright and as many as the stars – there is no language for them. How can I tell you them? They are there – see?”
As she spoke she slipped the mitten from his hand and thrust the hand inside the warmth of her parka until it rested against her heart. Tightly and steadily she pressed his hand in its position. And in the long silence he felt the beat, beat of her heart, and knew that every beat of it was love. And then, slowly, almost imperceptibly, still holding his hand, her body began to incline away from his and toward the direction of the cache. Nor could he resist. It was as if he were drawn by her heart itself that so nearly lay in the hollow of his hand.
So firm was the crust, frozen during the night after the previous day’s surface-thaw, that they slid along rapidly on their skees.
“Just here, in the trees, is the cache,” Labiskwee told Smoke.
The next moment she caught his arm with a startle of surprise. The flames of a small fire were dancing merrily, and crouched by the fire was McCan. Labiskwee muttered something in Indian, and so lashlike was the sound that Smoke remembered she had been called “cheetah” by Four Eyes.
“I was minded you’d run without me,” McCan explained when they came up, his small peering eyes glimmering with cunning. “So I kept an eye on the girl, an’ when I seen her caching skees an’ grub, I was on. I’ve brought my own skees an’ webs an’ grub. The fire? Sure, an’ it was no danger. The camp’s asleep an’ snorin’, an’ the waitin’ was cold. Will we be startin’ now?”
Labiskwee looked swift consternation at Smoke, as swiftly achieved a judgement on the matter, and spoke. And in the speaking she showed, child-woman though she was in love, the quick decisiveness of one who in other affairs of life would be no clinging vine.
“McCan, you are a dog,” she hissed, and her eyes were savage with anger. “I know it is in your heart to raise the camp if we do not take you. Very well. We must take you. But you know my father. I am like my father. You will do your share of the work. You will obey. And if you play one dirty trick, it would be better for you if you had never run.”
McCan looked up at her, his small pig-eyes hating and cringing, while in her eyes, turned to Smoke, the anger melted into luminous softness.
“Is it right, what I have said?” she queried.
Daylight found them in the belt of foothills that lay between the rolling country and the mountains. McCan suggested breakfast, but they held on. Not until the afternoon thaw softened the crust and prevented travel would they eat.
The foothills quickly grew rugged, and the stream, up whose frozen bed they journeyed, began to thread deeper and deeper canyons. The signs of spring were less frequent, though in one canyon they found foaming bits of open water, and twice they came upon clumps of dwarf willow upon which were the first hints of swelling buds.
Labiskwee explained to Smoke her knowledge of the country and the way she planned to baffle pursuit. There were but two ways out, one west, the other south. Snass would immediately dispatch parties of young men to guard the two trails. But there was another way south. True, it did no more than penetrate half-way into the high mountains, then, twisting to the west and crossing three divides, it joined the regular trail. When the young men found no traces on the regular trail they would turn back in the belief that the escape had been made by the west traverse, never dreaming that the runaways had ventured the harder and longer way around.
Glancing back at McCan, in the rear, Labiskwee spoke in an undertone to Smoke. “He is eating,” she said. “It is not good.”
Smoke looked. The Irishman was secretly munching caribou suet from the pocketful he carried.
“No eating between meals, McCan,” he commanded. “There’s no game in the country ahead, and the grub will have to be whacked in equal rations from the start. The only way you can travel with us is by playing fair.”
By one o’clock the crust had thawed so that the skees broke through, and before two o’clock the web-shoes were breaking through. Camp was made and the first meal eaten. Smoke took stock of the food. McCan’s supply was a disappointment. So many silver fox-skins had he stuffed in the bottom of the meat bag that there was little space left for meat.
“Sure an’ I didn’t know there was so many,” he explained. “I done it in the dark. But they’re worth good money. An’ with all this ammunition we’ll be gettin’ game a-plenty.”
“The wolves will eat you a-plenty,” was Smoke’s hopeless comment, while Labiskwee’s eyes flashed their anger.
Enough food for a month, with careful husbanding and appetites that never blunted their edge, was Smoke’s and Labiskwee’s judgment. Smoke apportioned the weight and bulk of the packs, yielding in the end to Labiskwee’s insistence that she, too, should carry a pack.
Next day the stream shallowed out in a wide mountain valley, and they were already breaking through the crust on the flats when they gained the harder surface of the slope of the divide.
“Ten minutes later and we wouldn’t have got across the flats,” Smoke said, when they paused for breath on the bald crest of the summit. “We must be a thousand feet higher here.”
But Labiskwee, without speaking, pointed down to an open flat among the trees. In the midst of it, scattered abreast, were five dark specks that scarcely moved.
“The young men,” said Labiskwee.
“They are wallowing to their hips,” Smoke said. “They will never gain the hard footing this day. We have hours the start of them. Come on, McCan. Buck up. We don’t eat till we can’t travel.”
McCan groaned, but there was no caribou suet in his pocket, and he doggedly brought up the rear.
In the higher valley in which they now found themselves, the crust did not break till three in the afternoon, at which time they managed to gain the shadow of a mountain where the crust was already freezing again. Once only they paused to get out McCan’s confiscated suet, which they ate as they walked. The meat was frozen solid, and could be eaten only after thawing over a fire. But the suet crumbled in their mouths and eased the palpitating faintness in their stomachs.
Black darkness, with an overcast sky, came on after a long twilight at nine o’clock, when they made camp in a clump of dwarf spruce. McCan was whining and helpless. The day’s march had been exhausting, but in addition, despite his nine years’ experience in the arctic, he had been eating snow and was in agony with his parched and burning mouth. He crouched by the fire and groaned, while they made the camp.
Labiskwee was tireless, and Smoke could not but marvel at the life in her body, at the endurance of mind and muscle. Nor was her cheerfulness forced. She had ever a laugh or a smile for him, and her hand lingered in caress whenever it chanced to touch his. Yet, always, when she looked at McCan, her face went hard and pitiless and her eyes flashed frostily.
In the night came wind and snow, and through a day of blizzard they fought their way blindly, missing the turn of the way that led up a small stream and crossed a divide to the west. For two more days they wandered, crossing other and wrong divides, and in those two days they dropped spring behind and climbed up into the abode of winter.
“The young men have lost our trail, an’ what’s to stop us restin’ a day?” McCan begged.
But no rest was accorded. Smoke and Labiskwee knew their danger. They were lost in the high mountains, and they had seen no game nor signs of game. Day after day they struggled on through an iron configuration of landscape that compelled them to labyrinthine canyons and valleys that led rarely to the west. Once in such a canyon, they could only follow it, no matter where it led, for the cold peaks and higher ranges on either side were unscalable and unendurable. The terrible toil and the cold ate up energy, yet they cut down the size of the ration they permitted themselves.
One night Smoke was awakened by a sound of struggling. Distinctly he heard a gasping and strangling from where McCan slept. Kicking the fire into flame, by its light he saw Labiskwee, her hands at the Irishman’s throat and forcing from his mouth a chunk of partly chewed meat. Even as Smoke saw this, her hand went to her hip and flashed with the sheath-knife in it.
“Labiskwee!” Smoke cried, and his voice was peremptory.
The hand hesitated.
“Don’t,” he said, coming to her side.
She was shaking with anger, but the hand, after hesitating a moment longer, descended reluctantly to the sheath. As if fearing she could not restrain herself, she crossed to the fire and threw on more wood. McCan sat up, whimpering and snarling, between fright and rage spluttering an inarticulate explanation.
“Where did you get it?” Smoke demanded.
“Feel around his body,” Labiskwee said.
It was the first word she had spoken, and her voice quivered with the anger she could not suppress.
McCan strove to struggle, but Smoke gripped him cruelly and searched him, drawing forth from under his armpit, where it had been thawed by the heat of his body, a strip of caribou meat. A quick exclamation from Labiskwee drew Smoke’s attention. She had sprung to McCan’s pack and was opening it. Instead of meat, out poured moss, spruce-needles, chips – all the light refuse that had taken the place of the meat and given the pack its due proportion minus its weight.
Again Labiskwee’s hand went to her hip, and she flew at the culprit only to be caught in Smoke’s arms, where she surrendered herself, sobbing with the futility of her rage.
“Oh, lover, it is not the food,” she panted. “It is you, your life. The dog! He is eating you, he is eating you!”
“We will yet live,” Smoke comforted her. “Hereafter he shall carry the flour. He can’t eat that raw, and if he does I’ll kill him myself, for he will be eating your life as well as mine.” He held her closer. “Sweetheart, killing is men’s work. Women do not kill.”
“You would not love me if I killed the dog?” she questioned in surprise.
“Not so much,” Smoke temporized.
She sighed with resignation. “Very well,” she said. “I shall not kill him.”
The pursuit by the young men was relentless. By miracles of luck, as well as by deduction from the topography of the way the runaways must take, the young men picked up the blizzard-blinded trail and clung to it. When the snow flew, Smoke and Labiskwee took the most improbable courses, turning east when the better way opened south or west, rejecting a low divide to climb a higher. Being lost, it did not matter. Yet they could not throw the young men off. Sometimes they gained days, but always the young men appeared again. After a storm, when all trace was lost, they would cast out like a pack of hounds, and he who caught the later trace made smoke signals to call his comrades on.
Smoke lost count of time, of days and nights and storms and camps. Through a vast mad phantasmagoria of suffering and toil he and Labiskwee struggled on, with McCan somehow stumbling along in the rear, babbling of San Francisco, his everlasting dream. Great peaks, pitiless and serene in the chill blue, towered about them. They fled down black canyons with walls so precipitous that the rock frowned naked, or wallowed across glacial valleys where frozen lakes lay far beneath their feet. And one night, between two storms, a distant volcano glared the sky. They never saw it again, and wondered whether it had been a dream.
Crusts were covered with yards of new snow, that crusted and were snow-covered again. There were places, in canyon- and pocket-drifts, where they crossed snow hundreds of feet deep, and they crossed tiny glaciers, in drafty rifts, wind-scurried and bare of any snow. They crept like silent wraiths across the faces of impending avalanches, or roused from exhausted sleep to the thunder of them. They made fireless camps above timber-line, thawing their meat-rations with the heat of their bodies ere they could eat. And through it all Labiskwee remained Labiskwee. Her cheer never vanished, save when she looked at McCan, and the greatest stupor of fatigue and cold never stilled the eloquence of her love for Smoke.
Like a cat she watched the apportionment of the meager ration, and Smoke could see that she grudged McCan every munch of his jaws. Once, she distributed the ration. The first Smoke knew was a wild harangue of protest from McCan. Not to him alone, but to herself, had she given a smaller portion than to Smoke. After that, Smoke divided the meat himself. Caught in a small avalanche one morning after a night of snow, and swept a hundred yards down the mountain, they emerged half-stifled and unhurt, but McCan emerged without his pack in which was all the flour. A second and larger snow-slide buried it beyond hope of recovery. After that, though the disaster had been through no fault of his, Labiskwee never looked at McCan, and Smoke knew it was because she dared not.
It was a morning, stark still, clear blue above, with white sun-dazzle on the snow. The way led up a long, wide slope of crust. They moved like weary ghosts in a dead world. No wind stirred in the stagnant, frigid calm. Far peaks, a hundred miles away, studding the backbone of the Rockies up and down, were as distinct as if no more than five miles away.
“Something is going to happen,” Labiskwee whispered. “Don’t you feel it? – here, there, everywhere? Everything is strange.”
“I feel a chill that is not of cold,” Smoke answered. “Nor is it of hunger.”
“It is in your head, your heart,” she agreed excitedly. “That is the way I feel it.”
“It is not of my senses,” Smoke diagnosed. “I sense something, from without, that is tingling me with ice; it is a chill of my nerves.”
A quarter of an hour later they paused for breath.
“I can no longer see the far peaks,” Smoke said.
“The air is getting thick and heavy,” said Labiskwee. “It is hard to breathe.”
“There be three suns,” McCan muttered hoarsely, reeling as he clung to his staff for support.
There was a mock sun on either side of the real sun.
“There are five,” said Labiskwee; and as they looked, new suns formed and flashed before their eyes.
“By Heaven, the sky is filled with suns beyant all countin’,” McCan cried in fear.
Which was true, for look where they would, half the circle of the sky dazzled and blazed with new suns forming.
McCan yelped sharply with surprise and pain. “I’m stung!” he cried out, then yelped again.
Then Labiskwee cried out, and Smoke felt a prickling stab on his cheek so cold that it burned like acid. It reminded him of swimming in the salt sea and being stung by the poisonous filaments of Portuguese men-of-war. The sensations were so similar that he automatically brushed his cheek to rid it of the stinging substance that was not there.
And then a shot rang out, strangely muffled. Down the slope were the young men, standing on their skees, and one after another opened fire.
“Spread out!” Smoke commanded. “And climb for it! We’re almost to the top. They’re a quarter of a mile below, and that means a couple of miles the start of them on the down-going of the other side.”
With faces prickling and stinging from invisible atmospheric stabs, the three scattered widely on the snow surface and toiled upward. The muffled reports of the rifles were weird to their ears.
“Thank the Lord,” Smoke panted to Labiskwee, “that four of them are muskets, and only one a Winchester. Besides, all these suns spoil their aim. They are fooled. They haven’t come within a hundred feet of us.”
“It shows my father’s temper,” she said. “They have orders to kill.”
“How strange you talk,” Smoke said. “Your voice sounds far away.”
“Cover your mouth,” Labiskwee cried suddenly. “And do not talk. I know what it is. Cover your mouth with your sleeve, thus, and do not talk.”
McCan fell first, and struggled wearily to his feet. And after that all fell repeatedly ere they reached the summit. Their wills exceeded their muscles, they knew not why, save that their bodies were oppressed by a numbness and heaviness of movement. From the crest, looking back, they saw the young men stumbling and falling on the upward climb.
“They will never get here,” Labiskwee said. “It is the white death. I know it, though I have never seen it. I have heard the old men talk. Soon will come a mist – unlike any mist or fog or frost-smoke you ever saw. Few have seen it and lived.”
McCan gasped and strangled.
“Keep your mouth covered,” Smoke commanded.
A pervasive flashing of light from all about them drew Smoke’s eyes upward to the many suns. They were shimmering and veiling. The air was filled with microscopic fire-glints. The near peaks were being blotted out by the weird mist; the young men, resolutely struggling nearer, were being engulfed in it. McCan had sunk down, squatting, on his skees, his mouth and eyes covered by his arms.
“Come on, make a start,” Smoke ordered.
“I can’t move,” McCan moaned.
His doubled body set up a swaying motion. Smoke went toward him slowly, scarcely able to will movement through the lethargy that weighed his flesh. He noted that his brain was clear. It was only the body that was afflicted.
“Let him be,” Labiskwee muttered harshly.
But Smoke persisted, dragging the Irishman to his feet and facing him down the long slope they must go. Then he started him with a shove, and McCan, braking and steering with his staff, shot into the sheen of diamond-dust and disappeared.
Smoke looked at Labiskwee, who smiled, though it was all she could do to keep from sinking down. He nodded for her to push off, but she came near to him, and side by side, a dozen feet apart, they flew down through the stinging thickness of cold fire.
Brake as he would, Smoke’s heavier body carried him past her, and he dashed on alone, a long way, at tremendous speed that did not slacken till he came out on a level, crusted plateau. Here he braked till Labiskwee overtook him, and they went on, again side by side, with diminishing speed which finally ceased. The lethargy had grown more pronounced. The wildest effort of will could move them no more than at a snail’s pace. They passed McCan, again crouched down on his skees, and Smoke roused him with his staff in passing.
“Now we must stop,” Labiskwee whispered painfully, “or we will die. We must cover up – so the old men said.”
She did not delay to untie knots, but began cutting her pack-lashings. Smoke cut his, and, with a last look at the fiery death-mist and the mockery of suns, they covered themselves over with the sleeping-furs and crouched in each other’s arms. They felt a body stumble over them and fall, then heard feeble whimpering and blaspheming drowned in a violent coughing fit, and knew it was McCan who huddled against them as he wrapped his robe about him.
Their own lung-strangling began, and they were racked and torn by a dry cough, spasmodic and uncontrollable. Smoke noted his temperature rising in a fever, and Labiskwee suffered similarly. Hour after hour the coughing spells increased in frequency and violence, and not till late afternoon was the worst reached. After that the mend came slowly, and between spells they dozed in exhaustion.
McCan, however, steadily coughed worse, and from his groans and howls they knew he was in delirium. Once, Smoke made as if to throw the robes back, but Labiskwee clung to him tightly.
“No,” she begged. “It is death to uncover now. Bury your face here, against my parka, and breathe gently and do no talking – see, the way I am doing.”
They dozed on through the darkness, though the decreasing fits of coughing of one invariably aroused the other. It was after midnight, Smoke judged, when McCan coughed his last. After that he emitted low and bestial moanings that never ceased.
Smoke awoke with lips touching his lips. He lay partly in Labiskwee’s arms, his head pillowed on her breast. Her voice was cheerful and usual. The muffled sound of it had vanished.
“It is day,” she said, lifting the edge of the robes a trifle. “See, O my lover. It is day; we have lived through; and we no longer cough. Let us look at the world, though I could stay here thus forever and always. This last hour has been sweet. I have been awake, and I have been loving you.”
“I do not hear McCan,” Smoke said. “And what has become of the young men that they have not found us?”
He threw back the robes and saw a normal and solitary sun in the sky. A gentle breeze was blowing, crisp with frost and hinting of warmer days to come. All the world was natural again. McCan lay on his back, his unwashed face, swarthy from camp-smoke, frozen hard as marble. The sight did not affect Labiskwee.
“Look!” she cried. “A snow bird! It is a good sign.”
There was no evidence of the young men. Either they had died on the other side of the divide or they had turned back.
There was so little food that they dared not eat a tithe of what they needed, nor a hundredth part of what they desired, and in the days that followed, wandering through the lone mountain-land, the sharp sting of life grew blunted and the wandering merged half into a dream. Smoke would become abruptly conscious, to find himself staring at the never-ending hated snow-peaks, his senseless babble still ringing in his ears. And the next he would know, after seeming centuries, was that again he was roused to the sound of his own maunderings. Labiskwee, too, was light-headed most of the time. In the main their efforts were unreasoned, automatic. And ever they worked toward the west, and ever they were baffled and thrust north or south by snow-peaks and impassable ranges.
“There is no way south,” Labiskwee said. “The old men know. West, only west, is the way.”
The young men no longer pursued, but famine crowded on the trail.
Came a day when it turned cold, and a thick snow, that was not snow but frost crystals of the size of grains of sand, began to fall. All day and night it fell, and for three days and nights it continued to fall. It was impossible to travel until it crusted under the spring sun, so they lay in their furs and rested, and ate less because they rested. So small was the ration they permitted that it gave no appeasement to the hunger pang that was much of the stomach, but more of the brain. And Labiskwee, delirious, maddened by the taste of her tiny portion, sobbing and mumbling, yelping sharp little animal cries of joy, fell upon the next day’s portion and crammed it into her mouth.
Then it was given to Smoke to see a wonderful thing. The food between her teeth roused her to consciousness. She spat it out, and with a great anger struck herself with her clenched fist on the offending mouth.
It was given to Smoke to see many wonderful things in the days yet to come. After the long snow-fall came on a great wind that drove the dry and tiny frost-particles as sand is driven in a sand-storm. All through the night the sand-frost drove by, and in the full light of a clear and wind-blown day, Smoke looked with swimming eyes and reeling brain upon what he took to be the vision of a dream. All about towered great peaks and small, lone sentinels and groups and councils of mighty Titans. And from the tip of every peak, swaying, undulating, flaring out broadly against the azure sky, streamed gigantic snow-banners, miles in length, milky and nebulous, ever waving lights and shadows and flashing silver from the sun.
