Told in the Hills: A Novel
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CHAPTER VI.
ON THE HEIGHTS.
While they commented, and wondered, and praised, and found fault withhim, the day drifted into darkness, the darkness into a dreary dawn; andthrough all changes of the hours the outlaw stalked, with sometimes hisghastly companion bound to the saddle, and then again he would remount,holding Snowcap in his arms--but seldom halting, never wavering; andMowitza, who seemed more than ever a familiar spirit, forged ahead as ifignoring the fact of hunger and scanty herbage to be found, her sturdypersistence suggesting a realization of her own importance.
A broad trail was left for them, one showing that the detachment ofbraves and the horses of the troops had returned under forced march tobear the news to their village--and such news!
The man's dark face hardened and more than one of those expressivemaledictions broke from him as he thought over it. All his sympathieswere with them. For five years they had been as brethren to him; neverhad any act of treachery touched him through them. To their people hewas not Genesee the outcast, the immoral, the suspected. He wasLamonti--of the mountains--like their own blood.
He was held wise in their councils, and his advice had weight.
He could have ruled their chief, and so their nation, had he beenambitious for such control.
He was their adopted son, and had never presumed on their liking, thoughhe knew there was little in their slender power that would not have beenhis had he desired it.
Now he knew he would be held their enemy. His influence had encouragedthe sending of that message and the offered braves to the commander ofthe troops. Would they grant him a hearing now? or would they shoot himdown, as the soldier had shot Snowcap, with his message undelivered?
Those questions, and the retrospection back of them, were with him as hewent upward into the mountains to the north.
Another night was falling slowly, and the jewels of the far skies one byone slipped from their ether casket, and shone with impressive serenityon the crusted snow. Along the last ridge Mowitza bore for the last timeher double burden. There was but a slope to descend, a sheltered cove toreach, and Snowcap would be given back to his kindred.
The glittering surface of the white carpet warmed into reflected lightsas the moon, a soft-footed, immature virgin, stole after the stars andlet her gleams be wooed and enmeshed in the receptive arms of thewhispering pine. Not a sound broke through the peace of the heights. Intheir sublime isolation, they lift souls as well as bodies above thecommonplace, and the rider, the stubborn keeper of so many of theirsecrets, threw back his head with a strange smile in his eyes as thelast summit was reached--and reached in the light of peace. Was it anomen of good? He thought of that girl back in the valley who was willingto share this life of the hills with him. All things beautiful made himthink of her, and the moon-kissed night was grand, up there above wheremen lived. He thought of her superb faith, not in what he was, but inwhat her woman's instinct told her it was possible for him to be. What auniverse of loves in human hearts revolves about those unseen, unprovensubstances!
He thought of the time when she had lain in his arms as Snowcap waslying, and he had carried her over the hills in the moonlight. He wasbitterly cold, but through the icy air there came the thrill and flushof that long-past temptation. He wondered what she would say when theytold her how he had used his freedom. The conviction of her approvalagain gave that strange smile of elation to his eyes; and the cold andhunger were ignored, and his fatigue fell from him. And with thetenderness that one gives to a sleeping child, he adjusted with hiswounded hands the blanket that slipped from the dead boy, raising one ofthe rigid arms the better to shroud it in the gay colors.
Then the peace of the heights was broken by a sharp report; thewhiteness of the moonlight was crossed by the quick, red flash of deathand Mowitza stopped still in her tracks, while her master, with thatdead thing clasped close in his arms, lunged forward on her neck.