Page:Ritchie - Trails to Two Moons.djvu/130

 halting wherever a handful of men had gathered together in a settlement to preach his doctrine of twelfth-hour repentance on the imminence of a judgment day of bitter penalties. Also he had sounded his new bugle note of crusade against the Philistines of the cattle clan. He had ranged the forested tangle of the Basin, summoning its silent men, its hunted men, to cross the mountains with him and join a new Joshua's host which he would raise against the oppressors of the weak. On both counts his mission had failed to bear fruit. Dwellers in the Basin knew no distinction between cattlemen and sheepmen, hated them both because their coming inevitably spelt the peopling of the wilderness and the destruction of a solitude which asked no questions. Uncle Alf boiled righteous wrath over the utter baseness of those who were deaf to his exhortings. "Let fire come down from heaven and utterly destroy 'em," was the prophet's parting valedictory for the recalcitrants who now lay shut behind him by the gate of the mountains. Then he let his rapt eye sweep the noble expanse of the Big Country like an unfolded scroll at his feet. The spirit of the wild seer leaped in tune with the sublimity there made