proffer as of old,' 'the biggest gamble of
all,' 'play for the biggest stake outside of Hell,' 'The Fate . . . of
the Land . . . with all Time looking on . . . since ever Time began,'
'all the World looking on . . . asking . . . keep sacred as the
Covenant of God . . . The stakes I'd play for . . . if I were
young . . . I'd up . . . I'd up . . . I'd up . . . stripped naked of
very hold-back . . . I'd hurl the lie in the teeth of a scoffing
world. I'd hurl y'r traitor leaders huckstering the land's good for
silver. . . . Fight . . . right . . . might . . . I'd paint the words
in letters of blood till they awakened the land. . . . I'd fight . . .
fight . . . fight till they had to kill every man of my kind before I'd
down . . .'

The old man had been like the storm wind of the mountains hurling off
the dead leaves of thought. Wayland paused in his pacing. The opal
peak emerged from pearl gray cloud wrack; a silver cross, translucent,
unreal, luminous, a thing of dreams winged with silver light beneath a
solitary star, eternal as God. And the night wind through the pines,
that had sounded so doleful but a moment before, became the jubilant
clicking of countless castanets, the castanets of the long pine
needles, sounding a triumphant chant to the touch of invisible hands.

Wayland stopped pacing. He almost stopped thinking. The
consciousness, the realizing sense of her presence, of her touch, of a
something more than her touch, of her being enveloping his in some
ethereal fire, went over the Ranger in fiercely tender flood tides;
this time, not in tumultuous confused desire, but in waves of strength,
in visions from which the mists had vanished, daring that laughed with
gladness over life. There were no longer two Waylands in conflict,
with one sneering and looking on. "A house divided against itself
shall fall." There was only one, with the blood of mothers in his
veins, whelmed by a consciousness that reached back far as the
consciousness of the race. Somehow, his simple manhood, the
inheritance in his blood of men and women, who had loved, fused the
conflict of his nature to a singleness of purpose and won peace now.

What he said was: "Come on, my friend, the enemy! I'm right here on
the job; nailed, you bet, long as she does it! Just to come alive is
worth being crucified."

"Hullo," bawled a towsled head through the cabin window. "Aren't you
going to turn in? It's exactly twelve o'clock!