“Frona Welse?” Vance Corliss was repeating to himself.

The whole thing seemed a dream, and he reassured himself by turning and looking after her retreating form.  Del Bishop and the Indians were already out of sight behind a wall of rock.  Frona was just rounding the base.  The sun was full upon her, and she stood out radiantly against the black shadow of the wall beyond.  She waved her alpenstock, and as he doffed his cap, rounded the brink and disappeared.

CHAPTER V

The position occupied by Jacob Welse was certainly an anomalous one.  He was a giant trader in a country without commerce, a ripened product of the nineteenth century flourishing in a society as primitive as that of the Mediterranean vandals.  A captain of industry and a splendid monopolist, he dominated the most independent aggregate of men ever drawn together from the ends of the earth.  An economic missionary, a commercial St. Paul, he preached the doctrines of expediency and force.  Believing in the natural rights of man, a child himself of democracy, he bent all men to his absolutism.  Government of Jacob Welse, for Jacob Welse and the people, by Jacob Welse, was his unwritten gospel.  Single-handed he had carved out his dominion till he gripped the domain of a dozen Roman provinces.  At his ukase the population ebbed and flowed over a hundred thousand miles of territory, and cities sprang up or disappeared at his bidding.

Yet he was a common man.  The air of the world first smote his lungs on the open prairie by the River Platte, the blue sky over head, and beneath, the green grass of the earth pressing against his tender nakedness.  On the horses his eyes first opened, still saddled and gazing in mild wonder on the miracle; for his trapper father had but turned aside from the trail that the wife might have quiet and the birth be accomplished.  An hour or so and the two, which were now three, were in the saddle and overhauling their trapper comrades.  The party had not been delayed; no time lost.  In the morning his mother cooked the breakfast over the camp-fire, and capped it with a fifty-mile ride into the next sun-down.

The trapper father had come of the sturdy Welsh stock which trickled into early Ohio out of the jostling East, and the mother was a nomadic daughter of the Irish emigrant settlers of Ontario.  From both sides came the Wanderlust of the blood, the fever to be moving, to be pushing on to the edge of things.  In the first year of his life, ere he had learned the way of his legs, Jacob Welse had wandered a-horse through a thousand miles of wilderness, and wintered in a hunting-lodge on the head-waters of the Red River of the North.  His first foot-gear was moccasins, his first taffy the tallow from a moose.  His first generalizations were that the world was composed of great wastes and white vastnesses, and populated with Indians and white hunters like his father.