Page:J Allan Dunn--The Girl of Ghost Mountain.djvu/67

Rh roan's gallop. Despite the crimes of the leading personage of the song—he had been everything from bank-robber to train-bandit, horse-thief, crooked card-player and woman-stealer—shot at last through the lungs to a death by slow music; this ballad was the apotheosis of the cowboy; the villain was a hero in "The Cowboy's Lament." Sheridan knew this, the local version, well, and smiled at the doleful solemnity with which Jackson invested it. It stopped abruptly as they came to the sandy bed of a creek that was now merely a trickle. There were no foothills proper on this side of the range, merely a few buttresses of detritus and, here and there, a projecting spur or headland of stubborn granite. Just ahead of them jutted out such a promontory.

"Ha'f a mile, or thereabouts on t' other side of that," announced Jackson, "is where the crick I was talkin' of heads out. There's the Old Ghost loomin' up.

The northern escarpments of Ghost Mountain soared into the sky, its crags, as wildly rugged as those overlooking Lake of the Woods, touched by the moon with a magic that seemed to dissolve the harsh rock to something more ethereal.

To achieve those battlemented heights, to storm that fortress through some rift backing a waterfall seemed ridiculous. But a growing excitement possessed both of them now that they neared the goal. Jackson, riding in the skirts of the timber on the lower slopes, found what he wanted in the shape of dry pine boughs and resinous knots for torches.