crook, I caught the dangling end of
the lariat, and was soon scrambling up the face of the cliff, leaving a
trail which the veriest novice would not fail to notice and sending
showers of the crumbling stones down the path taken by the knife; it was
several minutes before I had clambered over the face of the projecting
crag and was safe across the black chasm which lay athwart our trail.

If the Wild Hunter was indeed my father, he certainly was a woodcrafter
and scout to bring pride to a fellow's heart, for I doubted not that the
Indian boy was his retainer because the porcupine quill decorations on
his buckskin shirt had the same peculiar pattern as that on the wamus of
the Wild Hunter himself as well as on the collar of the pet sheep I had
killed, and also on the buckskin bag of gold.

CHAPTER XIV

Only those persons who have made solitary trips over snow-capped
mountain ridges can appreciate the overwhelming feeling of solitude that
I felt on looking about me. To whatever point of view I turned my eyes
were greeted with a tumbled sea composed of stupendous petrified
billows.

The occasional fields of snow were the white froth of the stony waves
and the turquoise colored glacial lakes between the crags rather added
to the effect of an angry ocean than detracted from it.

On a closer examination, some of the rocks appeared to be rough bits of
unfinished worlds still retaining the form they had when poured from the
mighty blast furnaces of the Creator. It was God's workshop strewn with
huge fragments, still bearing the marks of His mallet and chisel; yet
these cold barren wastes were the pasture lands of the shaggy-coated
white goats and the lithe-limbed bighorned sheep.

Suddenly a shrill whistle pierced the air and with a jump I
instinctively looked for a vision of the Wild Hunter, but a moment later
realized that the sound I heard was but the warning cry of a whistling
marmot. Again the silence was broken, this time by a low rumbling sound
which increased in volume until it roared like a broadside from an old
forty-four-gun man-of-war, each crag and peak taking up the sound and
hurling it against its neighbor, until the reverberating noise seemed to
come from all points of the compass.

Away in the distance I could see a white stream pouring from the
precipitous edge of an elevated glacier; this seeming mountain torrent I
knew was not water, but ice, thousands of tons of which having cracked
and brok