speak of him simply as The Man. There was something natural and apt in
the association. Then they avoided these two singular dwellers on the
height. What had happened to The Man when he lived in the village became
almost as great a legend as the Indian fable concerning The Stone. In
the minds of the people one seemed as old as the other. Women who knew
the awful disasters which had befallen The Man brooded at times most
timidly, regarding him as they did at first--and even still--The Stone.
Women who carried life unborn about with them had a strange dread of both
The Stone and The Man. Time passed on, and the feeling grew that The
Man's grief must be a terrible thing, since he lived alone with The Stone
and God. But this did not prevent the men of the village from digging
gold, drinking liquor, and doing many kinds of evil. One day, again,
they did an unjust and cruel thing. They took Pierre, the gambler, whom
they had at first sought to vanquish at his own art, and, possessed
suddenly of the high duty of citizenship, carried him to the edge of a
hill and dropped him over, thinking thereby to give him a quick death,
while the vultures would provide him a tomb. But Pierre was not killed,
though to his grave--unprepared as yet--he would bear an arm which should
never be lifted higher than his shoulder. When he waked from the
crashing gloom which succeeded the fall, he was in the presence of a
being whose appearance was awesome and massive--an outlawed god: whose
hair and beard were white, whose eye was piercing, absorbing, painful,
in the long perspective of its woe. This being sat with his great hand
clasped to the side of his head. The beginning of his look was the
village, and--though the vision seemed infinite--the village was the end
of it too. Pierre, looking through the doorway beside which he lay, drew
in his breath sharply, for it seemed at first as if The Man was an
unnatural fancy, and not a thing. Behind The Man was The Stone, which
was not more motionless nor more full of age than this its comrade.
Indeed, The Stone seemed more a thing of life as it poised above the