But Wayland was unheeding. What was it about snow flakes massing to a momentum that bevelled the granite and rolled away the rocks for the resurrection to a new life? Would it be so some day with the Nation? Would the quiet workers, the pure thinkers, the faithful citizens mass some day to sweep away the lawlessness, the outrage, the crime, the treachery, the trickery, the shame, the sham of self-government's failures; to roll away the stone for the resurrection to a new Democracy? 'High brows,' 'dreamers,' 'ghost walkers,' 'barkers,' 'biters,' 'muck-rakers!' Oh, he knew the choice names that lawless greed cast at such as he; but a greater than he had said something about the meek and the inheritance of the earth; and there lay the work of the snow flake across the trail. "I suppose," he remarked absently, "it's our duty to go down and dig those dead duffers out." "Nothing o' the kind. They'll keep cold storage till the crack o' doom, and after that 'tis an ice pack they'll need. The snow's too clean a grave for the likes o' them! The Lord has hewn out a path through the sea! Sound the loud timbrel and on!" CHAPTER XV THE DESERT Four days had passed since they stood on the edge of the snow slide and gazed across at three outlaws on the far side under the crag waving frantically where their belated comrades had been buried under the avalanche. When the outlaw drovers had turned and galloped into the blue slashed gully of the opposite mountain, the Ranger had observed that their only remaining pack horse was white, an old dappled white running with a limp. It had taken the better part of three days to cross above the wreckage of snows and forest. They had camped for two nights within a stone's throw of the upper glaciers. Wayland could see the reflection of the stars in the ice at night, and count the layers of the century's snow-fall that harked back, each layer a year's fall, to the eras before Christ. "The little snow flake has been on the job a long time," he said to the old preacher. Matthews didn't understand. "Can't make out why it's so hot when we're high up!" "The wind is off the Desert," said Wayland. "Mountains in a desert?" "That's the same as asking if you ever have summer in Saskatchewan." The frontiersman looked more puzzled than ever.