“Put your hand in mine.  Promise me before God, that you will not vanish from me; that you will not leave the ‘Anchorage’ until I come and see you there.”

“I promise; but time presses.  I must hasten to find Bertie.”

“Do you know exactly where to go?”

“Yes.  I have minute directions written down.”

“Wait until I come.  I trust you to keep your promise.  Ah! after to-day, I could not bear to lose my ‘Rosa Alba.’  God make me more worthy of my loyal and beautiful darling.  After all, not Alcestis, but Antigone!”

CHAPTER XXXV.

White and still, lay the world of the far Northwest, wrapped in peace as profound as that which reigned in primeval ages; when ancestral Nahuas, dragging their sleds across frozen Behring Straits, or cast amid other drift of the Japanese current upon the strange new Pacific shore, climbed the mountains, and fell on their faces before the sun, whose worshippers have sacrificed in all hemispheres.

If civilization be the analogue of geologic accretion, how tortuous is the trend and dip of the ethnological strata, how abrupt the overlapping of myths.  How many aeons divided the totem coyote from the she-wolf of Romulus and Remus?  Which is the primitive and parent flame, the sacred fire of Pueblo Estufas, of Greek Prytaneum, of Roman Vesta, of Persian Atish-khudahs?  If the Laurentian system be the oldest upheaval of land, and its “dawn animal” the first evolution of life that left fossil footprints, where are all the missing links in ethnology, which would save science that rejects Genesis—­the paradox of peopling the oldest known continent by immigration from those incalculably younger?

Winter had lagged, loath to set his snow shoes upon the lingering, diaphanous train of Indian Summer, but December was inexorable, and the livery of ice glittered everywhere in the mid-day sun.

Along a well-worn bridle trail, now slippery as glass, winding around the base of crags, through narrow gorges that almost overarched, leaving a mere skylight of intense blue to mark the way, moved a party of four persons in single file, slowly ascending a steep spiral.  In advance, mounted on a black pony, was a cowled monk, whose long, thin profile suggested that of Savonarola; and just behind him rode a Canadian half-breed guide, with the copperish red of aboriginal America on his high cheek bones, and the warm glow of sunny France in his keen black eyes.  Guiding his horse with the left hand, his right led the dappled mustang belonging to the third figure; a tall, broad-shouldered man wearing an overcoat that reached to his knees, who walked with his hand on the bridle bit of a white mule, whereon sat a woman, wrapped in silver fox furs from throat to feet.  A cap or hood of the same soft, warm material was worn over her head, where a roll of dark auburn hair coiled at the back; and around her white temples clustered rings and tendrils of the glossy bronze locks that contrasted so singularly with the black arch of the brows, and the fringe that darkened the luminous gray eyes.