All-Story Weekly, Vol. 112, No. 1 — page 76: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

66 fat man, shapeless within his rubber poncho, was balanced at the apex of the ridge of a raw-boned, scrawny, but brawny, gray mule, where it bore a resemblance to an enormous hot-water bottle. Where the plug of the receptacle should have been, thrust forth the vast pink face of Zalmon, a limp and lightless cigarette depending from his lower lip, extinguished as soon as_ kindled by the spray which the wind dashed into his countenance from the dripping brim of his drooping sombrero. But cordilleran weather with all its at- tendant discomforts could not dispel the sunshine of Zalmon’s smile.. That was indestructible. Jones, yielding to the inevitable with the best grace he could muster, had come to tolerate Grimshaw, as once before he had tolerated him. But Katherine, robbed of her son, hated him with a relentless and- unabating hatred, which looked out of her: eyes whenever they rested upon him; but to which he was smilingly impervious. From the pass of Yanashallas, the route which Don Castro had chosen to reach the Montana lay for many leagues through the almost treeless puna region of the upper slopes of the Cordillera—a succession of plateaux, interspersed with valleys, gorges, and cafions, cut mazelike among towering peaks and mountains of granite. Almost the only vegetation to be seen was the ichu grass in the valley meadows and on the plateaux; and the only reminders of animal life were the peculiar, plaintive cry of the vicuna, a species of small llama, met infrequently in the misty meadows, and the warning shriek of the alcamarini, a shy, white, gull-like bird. -Through the transverse rifts wild winds swept down from the summits of perpetual snows, chilling even the hardy mules, and benumbing their riders. Electric-storms continually rumbled across the upper pla- teaus. Sometimes the dampened atmos: phere became so surcharged with the fluid that the boas of vicuna fur, worn as a pro- tection against the winds, crackled at the slightest friction, as did the hair of their wearers also, even to the emission of sparks if it were combed in the dark. At times the trail became a mere ledge, ALL-STORY WEEKLY. scarce foothold for a mule, winding around the base of an overhanging cliff at the brink of some frightful chasm, in whose unseen depths roared and rushed a mountain torrent. In such spots each member of the crawl- ing little caravan, plodding on in single file, instinctively leaning toward the bulging rock walls, felt the fearful loneliness of nature’s solitudes: -at one hand the blind and forbidding mountainside; at the other the curling, billowing fantasies of the mists, creeping like white ghosts over the edge of the pathway, and beckoning with shadowy fingers to the terrible abyss which had given them birth; above them the clouds clinging about the summits of the granite spires— and so far floated the mists and so low the clouds, that none might say where was the boundary between them. Always in the open places was the same tremendous background of successive ridge and spur and peak, piled mass upon mass and pinnacle upon pinnacle to where the highest white-clad summits, gleaming in some far-off sunshine, seemed to belong to another world. Always the ear was saluted by the same distant thundering and mut- tering, either of swift, insistent storm or of slow, patient, grinding glacier. In this loneliness the tireless and hearty cursing of the arrieros was at once a wel- come relief and a never-failing diversion; though it was well that Katherine knew nothing.of the Quechua tongue in which it was couched. Certainly no muleteer of Andalusia in old Spain could have surpassed them in variety and fluency of objurgation. Nestled at the foot of the mighty peaks, on flat plateau, in rolling valley, or beside a turbulent stream, were occasional villages of the type of Huantar and San Marcos, inhabited by the Cholo descendants of the ancient Quechuas, over whom the Incas ruled. An out-of-the-world, primitive existence these people live, subsisting on the maize, potatoes and vegetables which they grow on the valley slopes, and on their noisy rookeries of fowls and their flocks of sheep and vicuna. In each of these towns were folks who knew Don Castro, and who came to wel- cCoOmiclbooks C©