for our companions, pushed on another day across the mountains. We had
at last sighted the prairies from our lofty heights, when, pressed by
hunger, I was so ill advised as to eat some of the berries we found
hanging to the bushes. As a result I suffered such vertigo that I was
compelled to lie quiet in camp. But Brown put in the time very well by
killing no less than six deer.

Early in the forenoon of the sixth, as we hastened down out of the
mountains, we again came within earshot of the torrential river of the
gorge. Drawn by the sound, we scrambled around the point of an
out-jutting ridge, and found ourselves on the river bank where it flowed
from the gorge. It was not the first time I had stood on that selfsame
spot.

"Good God!" I groaned. "After all our toil, and only this!"

"You may well say it, John," echoed a melancholy voice from beneath the
cliff upstream.

"Montgomery!" I cried. "You here?"

He appeared from around a big rock, sad and dejected; but at sight of my
companion, instantly assumed a look of unbending resolve.

"We scattered," he explained, as I grasped his hand. "The others took
the horses up out of the gorge by the least difficult of the side
ravines. I followed your trace down into the midst of that awesome cleft
and up the icy ascent. But I lost the trace on the mountain top, and so
came on down here--"

"To find that, after all our toil and privation, it is not the Red
River!" I cried.

"Ah, well, it is something to have rounded the headwaters of the
Arkansas," he replied. He turned to Brown: "You will find two of your
fellows downstream at the old camp. Join them, and see what the three of
you can do toward killing meat against the coming of the others."

"Aye, sir!" responded Brown, with ready salute.

He was striding off when I interrupted: "Wait! Montgomery, he has six
deer already hung."

"Good! The more the better! Fetch the other lads, Brown, and bring in
your game. If you see more deer, do what you can to bring them in too."

Brown saluted the second time, and started off at a dogtrot.

I looked inquiringly into the Lieutenant's darkening face and thought I
read his purpose. "If any of the horses come through alive, they will
nevertheless be too outworn for farther travel within many weeks. You
propose to go into winter quarters?"

"No!" he answered almost angrily.

"Yet the horses?" I argued.

"Poor beasts!" he sighed. "Would that I might put them out of their