ion to a new Democracy?
'High brows,' 'dreamers,' 'ghost walkers,' 'barkers,' 'biters,'
'muck-rakers!' Oh, he knew the choice names that lawless greed cast at
such as he; but a greater than he had said something about the meek and
the inheritance of the earth; and there lay the work of the snow flake
across the trail.

"I suppose," he remarked absently, "it's our duty to go down and dig
those dead duffers out."

"Nothing o' the kind. They'll keep cold storage till the crack o' doom,
and after that 'tis an ice pack they'll need. The snow's too clean a
grave for the likes o' them! The Lord has hewn out a path through the
sea! Sound the loud timbrel and on!"

CHAPTER XV

THE DESERT

Four days had passed since they stood on the edge of the snow slide and
gazed across at three outlaws on the far side under the crag waving
frantically where their belated comrades had been buried under the
avalanche. When the outlaw drovers had turned and galloped into the
blue slashed gully of the opposite mountain, the Ranger had observed
that their only remaining pack horse was white, an old dappled white
running with a limp.

It had taken the better part of three days to cross above the wreckage
of snows and forest. They had camped for two nights within a stone's
throw of the upper glaciers. Wayland could see the reflection of the
stars in the ice at night, and count the layers of the century's
snow-fall that harked back, each layer a year's fall, to the eras
before Christ.

"The little snow flake has been on the job a long time," he said to the
old preacher.

Matthews didn't understand. "Can't make out why it's so hot when we're
high up!"

"The wind is off the Desert," said Wayland.

"Mountains in a desert?"

"That's the same as asking if you ever have summer in Saskatchewan."

The frontiersman looked more puzzled than ever.

Wild longings to seize the day's joy came to the Ranger. If the snow
flake typified law sculpturing the centuries, law was a process not of
a life time, not of a century, but aeons of centuries; and flesh,
spirit, humanity's brevity cried out for the trancing joys of the
present. If law took billions of years to sculpture its purpose,
grinding down the transient lives in its way?--When Wayland came to
that _impasse_, he used to get off and walk. He did not know, and it
was well he did not know, she was pacing her room two hundred miles
back on the other side of the Divide, prayi