The Claim Jumpers

One afternoon they had pushed over back of Harney, up a very steep

little trail in a very tiny cleft-like cañon, verdant and cool. All at

once the trail had stood straight on end. The ponies scrambled up

somehow, and they found themselves on a narrow open mesa splashed

with green moss and matted with an aromatic covering of pine needles.

Beyond the easternmost edge of the plateau stood great spires of stone,

a dozen in all, several hundred feet high, and of solid granite. They

soared up grandly into the open blue, like so many cathedral spires,

drawing about them that air of solitude and stillness which accompanies

always the sublime in Nature. Even boundless space was amplified at the

bidding of their solemn uplifted fingers. The girl reined in her horse.

"Oh!" she murmured in a hushed voice, "I feel impertinent--as though I

were intruding."

A squirrel many hundreds of feet below could be heard faintly barking.

"There is something solemn about them," the boy agreed in the same

tone, "but, after all, we are nothing to them. They are thinking their

own thoughts, far above everything in the world."

She slipped from her horse.

"Let's sit here and watch them," she said. "I want to look at them, and

feel them."

They sat on the moss, and stared solemnly across at the great spires of

stone.

"They are waiting for something there," she observed; "for something

that has not come to pass, and they are looking for it always toward

the East. Don't you see how they are waiting?"

"Yes, like Indian warriors wrapped each in his blanket. They might be

the Manitous. They say there are lots of them in the Hills."

"Yes, of course!" she cried, on fire with the idea. "They are the Gods

of the people, and they are waiting for something that is

coming--something from the East. What is it?"

"Civilization," he suggested.

"Yes! And when this something, this Civilization, comes, then the

Indians are to be destroyed, and so their Gods are always watching for

it toward the East."

"And," he went on, "when it comes at last, then the Manitous will have

to die, and so the Indians know that their hour has struck when these

great stone needles fall."

"Why, we have made a legend," she exclaimed with wonder.

They stretched out on their backs along the slope, and stared up at the

newly dignified Manitous in delicious silence.

"There was a legend once, you remember?" he began hesitatingly, "the

first day we were on the Rock together. It was about a Spirit

Mountain."

"Yes, I remember, the day we saw the Shadow."

"You said you'd tell it to me some time."

"Did I?"

"Don't you think now is a good time?"