The two young men had never met since; but the one was under a cloud; the
other was refulgent with his petty triumph; and he had set his face all the
more toward any further aggressiveness that occasion should bring happily to
his hand.
The mere road might have shamed him into manlier reflections. It was one of
the forest highways of the majestic bison opened ages before into what must
have been to them Nature's most gorgeous kingdom, her fairest, most magical
Babylon: with hanging gardens of verdure
everywhere swung from the tree-domes to the ground; with the earth one vast
rolling garden of softest verdure and crystal waters: an ancient Babylon of
the Western woods, most alluring and in the end most fatal to the luxurious,
wantoning wild creatures, which know no sin and are never found wanting.
This old forest street of theirs, so broad, so roomy, so arched with hoary
trees, so silent now and filled with the pity and pathos of their ruin--it
may not after all have been marked out by them. But ages before they had
ever led their sluggish armies eastward to the Mississippi and, crossing,
had shaken its bright drops from their shaggy low-hung necks on the eastern
bank--ages before this, while the sun of human history was yet silvering the
dawn of the world--before Job's sheep lay sick in the land of Uz-- before a
lion had lain down to dream in the jungle where Babylon was to arise and to
become a name,--this old, old, old high road may have been a footpath of the
awful mastodon, who had torn his terrible way through the tangled, twisted,
gnarled and rooted fastnesses of the wilderness as lightly as a wild young
Cyclone out of the South tears his way through the ribboned corn.
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