c torture. For an instant, for
less than the fraction of an instant, it poised and coiled and looped as
a great white snake in and out among the far upper meadows: then ruptured
free with ear splitting wrench. The air was ripped to tatters. The
forest, the rock wall, the foundations of the universe gave way; the huge
hemlocks were tossing and bending like feathers; the upper forests
toppled and spilled like an inverted matchbox. Then the whole world,
earth, air, rocks, forest, shot down in a blinding rush, in a viscous
torrent of titanic fury. The surface of the mountain crumpled up and
peeled in a sliding mass.

Wayland came to himself hurled back a hundred feet knocked flat by an
invisible blow. The old frontiersman lay clinging to a prone trunk
spitting blood and gasping for air. The animals were scrambling to their
feet saddles twisted, bridles broken.

"'Twas the concussion of the air! A'm not hurt, not a feather o' my head
hurt! A've seen it before in the Rockies! Look back," he panted.

When the Ranger turned, the clouds of dust were settling, though the
earth still rocked. A hundred feet of snow lay across the trail in a
wall. Huge trees had been torn from the roots, sucked in, twisted and
torted like straws.

"Look," reiterated the old frontiersman.

Against the rock trail on the other side of the snow slide, three men
stood waving frantically. From the time the falling cornice of snow had
tossed up in a puff of smoke ten miles away to the fell stroke of the
titanic leveller of the ages--not ten seconds had passed. It would have
been an even bet that the men on the other side had been caught in the
middle of their sentences, in the middle of their signalling. As for the
injured man and his companion--Wayland looked down the mountain slope.
The snow slide had shot to the bottom and gone quarter way up the other
side.

"'Twill be safer now to cross to the other side! We can go up above the
snow slide and cross by the bare rocks!"

But Wayland was unheeding. What was it about snow flakes massing to a
momentum that bevelled the granite and rolled away the rocks for the
resurrection to a new life? Would it be so some day with the Nation?
Would the quiet workers, the pure thinkers, the faithful citizens mass
some day to sweep away the lawlessness, the outrage, the crime, the
treachery, the trickery, the shame, the sham of self-government's
failures; to roll away the stone for the resurrect