thousandth time,
a vague rumour had come to Drennen that those whom he sought had pushed
on here ahead of him and methodically he was running down each rumour.

Perhaps not a hundred men in a hundred years had come here before them.
The forests, tall and black and filled with gloom, were about them
everywhere. Their trail they made, and there were days when from
sunrise to sunset they did not progress five miles. Their two pack
animals found insecure footing; death awaited them hourly upon many a
day at the bottom of some sheer walled cliff. They climbed with the
sharp slopes on the mountains, they dropped down into the narrow,
flinty canons, they heard only the swish of tree tops and the
quarrelling of streams lost to their eyes in the depths below them.
And they came in two weeks to Blue Lake having seen no other man or
other trail than their own.

They were silent days. Neither man asked a question of the other and
neither referred to what lay deepest in his own breast. There was
sympathy between them, and it grew stronger day by day, but it was a
sympathy akin to that of the solitudes, none the less eloquent because
it was wordless. Sothern informed Drennen once, out of the customary
silence about the evening camp fire, that he was taking an indefinite
vacation; that there was a man in his place with the Northwestern who
was amply qualified to remain there permanently if Sothern did not come
back at all.

They sought to water at Blue Lake, so little known then and now already
one of the curiosities of the North and found its waters both luke warm
and salty. Although the lake is less than a quarter of a mile long
they were two hours in reaching the head. The mountains come down
steeply on all sides, the timber stands thick, boulders are scattered
everywhere, and it was already dark.

This is the first of the Nine Lakes when one approaches from the south.
Less than a hundred yards further north, its surface a third of that
distance above the level of Blue Lake, is Lake Wachong. It has no
visible connection with Blue Lake except when, with the heavy spring
thaw, there is a thin trickle of water down the boulders. Here they
camped for the night.

"We would have seen a trail if they had gone ahead of us this year,
Dave," Sothern remarked, referring for the first time in many days to
the matter which was always in Drennen's mind.

"There's another way in," Drennen told him. "They'd have gone that
way.