uble vision: She was there;
and, with him, sensible not only of the beauty of the night, but of
the indefinable mystery which broods over California the moment the
sun falls. Perhaps, too, he was troubled by a vague foreboding, such
as comes to mortals sometimes in spite of their limitations: he never
saw Fort Ross again.

On the horizon the fog crouched and moved; marched like a battalion of
ocean's ghosts; suddenly cohered and sent out light puffs of smoke, as
from the crater of a spectral volcano. The moon, full and bright and
cold, hung low in the dark sky: one hardly noted the stars. The vast
sweep of water was as calm as a lake, dark and metallic like the sky,
barely reflecting the silver light between. But although calm it was
not quiet. It greeted the forbidding rocks beyond the shore, the long
irregular line of stark, storm-beaten cliffs, with ominous mutter, now
and again throwing a cloud of spray high in the air, as if in derisive
proof that even in sleep it was sensible of its power. Occasionally it
moaned, as if sounding a dirge along the mass of stones which storms
had hurled or waves had wrenched from the crags above,--a dirge for
beheaded Russians, for him who had walked the plank, or for the lover
of Natalie Ivanhoff.

Here and there the cliffs were intersected by deep straggling gulches,
out of whose sides grew low woods of brush; but the three tables
rising successively from the ocean to the forest on the mountain, were
almost bare. On the highest, between two gulches, on a knoll so bare
and black and isolated that its destiny was surely taken into account
at creation, was a tall rude cross and a half hundred neglected
graves. The forest seemed blacker just behind it, the shadows thicker
in the gorges that embraced it, the ocean grayer and more illimitable
before it. "Natalie Ivanhoff is there in her copper coffin," said
Estenega, "forgotten already."

The curve of the mountain was so perfect that it seemed to reach down
a long arm on either side and grasp the cliffs. The redwoods on its
crown and upper slopes were a mass of rigid shadows, the points, only,
sharply etched on the night sky. They might have been a wall about an
undiscovered country.

"Come," cried Rotscheff, "we are ready to start." And Estenega sprang
to his horse.

"I don't envy you," said the Princess Helene from the veranda, her
silveren head barely visible above the furs which enveloped her. "I
prefer the fire."

"You are