That night the air over the valley was filled with a peculiar moan. All seemed quiet about them on the valley’s floor, but up above the moan continued, a weird, dismal battle anthem of the mountain winds. Next morning soft snowflakes were falling into the sink, while up above a great storm raged, and snow-dust blew from the tops of distant peaks in awe-inspiring banners half a mile in length. The war banners of the mountain winds, mobilizing for the grand charge and chanting triumphantly! CHAPTER XXII DR. SHONTO RIDES ALONE DOWN on the desert, a day’s journey in the saddle from Diamond H Ranch, where the pilgrims to the Valley of Arcana had left their cars, lived an old man named Gustav Tanburt. His rancho had its existence because of an oasis similar to the one at Diamond H, and he had prospered throughout the years that he had lived there as a desert rat. Through his broad acres passed a road extending at right angles to the road that entered the property of his distant neighbour. This last-mentioned road--the one by which Charmian’s party had reached Diamond H Ranch--went no farther, and the trackless sweeps of the desert separated the two properties. But Tanburt’s road was moderately well travelled. Freighters driving eight- and ten- and twelve-horse teams pursued it on their way to a distant mining community in the mountains. Gus Tanburt’s ranch was a station for them and all other travellers passing that way, and Gus took a heavy toll for meals and feed for stock and even water. In the mountains he had cheap pasturage in the National Forest, for he was an old-timer in the Shinbone Country and had used the grass long before the passage of the act which placed the forest lands under government control. Hence he had the preference, as is the government ruling, and he used it to force out all competing cattlemen in the district. The war, with the resultant high price of beef and hides, had made him. Ignorant, old, crabbed, alone, unliked by all who knew him, he was now worth nearly half a million dollars, which did him very little good. For he limped about with a cane and had not mounted a horse for several years. Wretched and old and worn to a wreck--and he longed for youth and something to spend his money for, and a bud of a girl named Rosaline Dimmette, who lived with her parents on a forest homestead in the centre of his summer grazing lands.