would be empty on paper, meaningless without the puckered lip, the
interhiss, the brutal semi-snarl restrained by human mastery, the snap
and jerk of wrist and gleam of steel-gray eye, that really told the
tale, of which the spoken word was mere headline. Another, a subtler
theme was theirs that night; not in the line but in the interline it
ran; and listening to the hunter's ruder tale, I heard as one may hear
the night bird singing in the storm; amid the glitter of the mica I
caught the glint of gold, for theirs was a parable of hill-born power
that fades when it finds the plains. They told of the giant redwood's
growth from a tiny seed; of the avalanche that, born a snowflake,
heaves and grows on the peaks, to shrink and die on the level lands
below. They told of the river at our feet: of its rise, a thread-like
rill, afar on Tallac's side, and its growth--a brook, a stream, a
little river, a river, a mighty flood that rolled and ran from hills
to plain to meet a final doom so strange that only the wise believe.
Yes, I have seen it; it is there to-day--the river, the wonderful
river, that unabated flows, but that never reaches the sea.

I give you the story then as it came to me, and yet I do not give it,
for theirs is a tongue unknown to script: I give a dim translation;
dim, but in all ways respectful, reverencing the indomitable spirit of
the mountaineer, worshiping the mighty Beast that nature built a
monument of power, and loving and worshiping the clash, the awful
strife heroic, at the close, when these two met.




In this Book the designs for cover, title-page, and general make-up
were done by Grace Gallatin Seton.