Snap: A legend of the Lone MountainPhillipps-Wolley, Clive
General
Snap: A legend of the Lone Mountain
Phillipps-Wolley, Clive
Canadian Rockies (B.C. and Alta.) -- Fiction; English fiction -- 19th century; Mountaineering -- Fiction
As they drew near, the boys saw that he was right. The figures were
monuments of wood, carved like men sometimes, at others like quaintly
devised demons. The pennons floated from what were but dead men's
headstones, and in the white tents with open doorways lay chieftains
sleeping the last long sleep and waiting 'till the flush of morning,
the morning of another world, should break along their battlefield.'
Suddenly an exclamation from Towzer drew all eyes to a point a few
hundred feet above this camp of the dead. The boy's eyes were wide
open, and his jaw dropped in horror. His flesh crept as he looked.
Above the graveyard the rock rose sheer and steep, a wall of rock
like the side of a house, and yet as the boys looked in the misty
light they saw one after another a long train of white figures slowly
passing across it. One by one they paced along, sedate and slow,
their snowy whiteness coming out in strong contrast to the gloom of
their surroundings.
'What is it?' asked Snap in an awed under-tone.
'Bust me if I knows,' said Dick with savage earnestness, 'but, ghosts
or no, I am a-goin' to hide up there. I guess ghosts don't hurt as
much as Crows, anyway.'
Meanwhile Snap had brought his glass to bear on the rock.
'All right, Dick,' he laughed, 'you were pretty near. If they aren't
ghosts they are goats, which sounds something like it, though I never
heard of goats like 'em before.'
'Rocky Mountain goats! are they, by thunder?' ejaculated Wharton;
'wal, I've often heerd tell of 'em, but never seed any till to-day.
You're sure they are goats, Snap?'
'Yes, quite sure; but look for yourself,' and he handed the glasses
to Wharton.
'Well, they're rum-looking critters,' remarked Dick after a long
stare at the white procession now disappearing over a shoulder of the
rock; 'they're goats right enough, though they do look more like
little buffalo-bulls with that hump on their shoulders. But, all the
same, they're Warwolf's ghosts as well,' he added with a laugh.
After tramping round the foot of the mountain for a while, Towzer,
who was ahead of the rest, called out, 'And there's Warwolf's bird,
by Jupiter! our old friend the balloon!'
Even Frank managed to 'boil up' a trot when they heard this, to find
Towzer staring up to the highest peak, six or seven thousand feet
above where they then stood, over the very topmost stone of which a
great balloon seemed to hover.
No wonder that that great mass of white silk, rising and falling as
if all a-tremble with life, now darting out a few yards from its
eyrie, now settling slowly back again, had filled the simple Indians
with fear and awe. Even to the whites, who understood it, it was a
marvel. What was it doing there? Who brought it, and why did he
anchor his sky-ship in such a harbour? Where, too, was he, its
master mariner?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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