ds cried,
brokenly: "Lass--go--in--the house."

But Columbine did not move, and Wade felt her shaking as she leaned
against him.

The bridegroom approached. Drunk indeed he was; not hilariously, as one
who celebrated his good fortune, but sullenly, tragically,
hideously drunk.

Old Belllounds leaped off the porch. His gray hair stood up like the
mane of a lion. Like a giant's were his strides. With a lunge he met his
reeling son, swinging a huge fist into the sodden red face. Limply Jack
fell to the ground.

"Lay there, you damned prodigal!" he roared, terrible in his rage. "You
disgrace me--an' you disgrace the girl who's been a daughter to me!...
if you ever have another weddin'-day it'll not be me who sets it!"

CHAPTER XII

November was well advanced before there came indications that winter was
near at hand.

One morning, when Wade rode up to Moore's cabin, the whole world seemed
obscured in a dense gray fog, through which he could not see a rod ahead
of him. Later, as he left, the fog had lifted shoulder-high to the
mountains, and was breaking to let the blue sky show. Another morning it
was worse, and apparently thicker and grayer. As Wade climbed the trail
up toward the mountain-basin, where he hunted most these days, he
expected the fog to lift. But it did not. The trail under the hoofs of
the horse was scarcely perceptible to him, and he seemed lost in a
dense, gray, soundless obscurity.

Suddenly Wade emerged from out the fog into brilliant sunshine. In amaze
he halted. This phenomenon was new to him. He was high up on the
mountain-side, the summit of which rose clear-cut and bold into the sky.
Below him spread what resembled a white sea. It was an immense
cloud-bank, filling all the valleys as if with creamy foam or snow,
soft, thick, motionless, contrasting vividly with the blue sky above.
Old White Slides stood out, gray and bleak and brilliant, as if it were
an island rock in a rolling sea of fleece. Far across this strange,
level cloud-floor rose the black line of the range. Wade watched the
scene with a kind of rapture. He was alone on the heights. There was not
a sound. The winds were stilled. But there seemed a mighty being awake
all around him, in the presence of which Wade felt how little were his
sorrows and hopes.

Another day brought dull-gray scudding clouds, and gusts of wind and
squalls of rain, and a wailing through the bare aspens. It grew colder
and bleaker and darker. Rain