breath of awe as he turned and looked about him.
Overhead the sky was sparkling with innumerable stars, and the crescent
moon was shining like burnished silver, while level with his breast rolled
a limitless, silent, and mystical ocean of cloud which broke against the
dark peaks in soundless surf, and spread away to the east in ever-widening
shimmer. All the lesser hills were covered; only the lords of the range
towered above the flood in sullen and unmoved majesty.

For a long time Cavanagh stood beside his weary horses, filling his soul
with the beauty of this world, so familiar yet so transformed. He wished
for his love; she would feel and know and rejoice with him. It was such
experiences as these that made him content with his work. For the ranger
Nature plays her profoundest dramas--sometimes with the rush of winds, the
crash of thunder; sometimes like this, in silence so deep that the act of
breathing seems a harsh, discordant note.

Slowly the mystic waters fell away, sinking with slightly rolling action
into the valleys, and out of the wool-white waves sudden sharp dark forms
upthrust like strange masters of the deep. Towers took shape and islands
upheaved, crowned with dark fortresses. To the west a vast and inky-black
Gibraltar magically appeared. Soon the sea was but a prodigious river
flowing within the high walls of an ancient glacier, a ghost of the icy
stream that once ground its slow way between these iron cliffs.

With a shudder of awe the ranger turned from the intolerable beauty of
this combination of night, cloud, and mountain-crest, and resumed his
climb. Such scenes, by their majesty, their swift impermanency, their
colossal and heedless haste, made his heart ache with indefinable regret.
Again and again he looked back, longing for some power which would enable
him to record and reproduce for the eyes of his love some part of this
stupendous and noiseless epic. He was no longer content to enjoy Nature's
splendors alone.

On the cold and silent side of the great divide the faint light of the
shepherd's teepee shone, and with a returning sense of his duty to his
fellows on the roof of the continent, Cavanagh pushed onward.

Wetherford met him at the door, no longer the poor old tramp, but a
priest, one who has devoted himself to Christ's service.

"How is he?" asked the ranger.

"Delirious," replied the herder. "I've had to hold him to his bed. I'm
glad you've come. It's lonesome up here. Don'