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TIOBA

AND OTHER TALES

By Arthur Colton

With a Frontispiece by A. B. Frost

New York

Henry Holt And Company

1903


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DEDICATED TO

A. G. BRINSMADE




TIOBA

FROM among the birches and pines, where we pitched our moving tent, you
looked over the flat meadow-lands; and through these went a river,
slow and almost noiseless, wandering in the valley as if there were
no necessity of arriving anywhere at appointed times. “What is the
necessity?” it said softly to any that would listen. And there was none;
so that for many days the white tent stood among the trees, overlooking
the haycocks in the meadows. It was enough business in hand to study the
philosophy and the subtle rhetoric of Still River.

Opposite rose a strangely ruined mountain-side. There was a nobly-poised
head and plenteous chest, the head three thousand feet nearer the
stars--which was little enough from their point of view, no doubt, but
to us it seemed a symbol of something higher than the stars, something
beyond them forever waiting and watching.

From its feet upward half a mile the mountain was one raw wound. The
shivered roots and tree-trunks stuck out helplessly from reddish soil,
boulders were crushed and piled in angry heaps, veins of granite ripped
open--the skin and flesh of the mountain tom off with a curse, and the
bones made a mockery. The wall of the precipice rose far above this
desolation, and, beyond, the hazy forests went up a mile or more clear
to the sky-line. The peak stood over