THE SPIRES OF STONE

One afternoon they had pushed over back of Harney, up a very steep little trail in a very tiny cleft-like canon, verdant and cool.  All at once the trail had stood straight on end.  The ponies scrambled up somehow, and they found themselves on a narrow open mesa splashed with green moss and matted with an aromatic covering of pine needles.

Beyond the easternmost edge of the plateau stood great spires of stone, a dozen in all, several hundred feet high, and of solid granite.  They soared up grandly into the open blue, like so many cathedral spires, drawing about them that air of solitude and stillness which accompanies always the sublime in Nature.  Even boundless space was amplified at the bidding of their solemn uplifted fingers.  The girl reined in her horse.

“Oh!” she murmured in a hushed voice, “I feel impertinent—­as though I were intruding.”

A squirrel many hundreds of feet below could be heard faintly barking.

“There is something solemn about them,” the boy agreed in the same tone, “but, after all, we are nothing to them.  They are thinking their own thoughts, far above everything in the world.”

She slipped from her horse.

“Let’s sit here and watch them,” she said.  “I want to look at them, and feel them.”

They sat on the moss, and stared solemnly across at the great spires of stone.

“They are waiting for something there,” she observed; “for something that has not come to pass, and they are looking for it always toward the East.  Don’t you see how they are waiting?”

“Yes, like Indian warriors wrapped each in his blanket.  They might be the Manitous.  They say there are lots of them in the Hills.”

“Yes, of course!” she cried, on fire with the idea.  “They are the Gods of the people, and they are waiting for something that is coming—­something from the East.  What is it?”

“Civilization,” he suggested.

“Yes!  And when this something, this Civilization, comes, then the Indians are to be destroyed, and so their Gods are always watching for it toward the East.”

“And,” he went on, “when it comes at last, then the Manitous will have to die, and so the Indians know that their hour has struck when these great stone needles fall.”

“Why, we have made a legend,” she exclaimed with wonder.

They stretched out on their backs along the slope, and stared up at the newly dignified Manitous in delicious silence.

“There was a legend once, you remember?” he began hesitatingly, “the first day we were on the Rock together.  It was about a Spirit Mountain.”

“Yes, I remember, the day we saw the Shadow.”

“You said you’d tell it to me some time.”

“Did I?”

“Don’t you think now is a good time?”

She considered a moment idly.

“Why, yes, I suppose so,” she assented, after a pause.  “It isn’t much of a legend though.”  She clasped her hands back of her head.  “It goes like this,” she began comfortably: