nd the trodden earth held fresh and plain the
trail he sought.

Leading the horse again, he climbed up from the level of the lake
toward the cliff tops. The trail, hazardous enough at all times,
looking now and then impossible, wound and twisted among the boulders,
snaked its way into a narrow gorge, mounted along a bit of bench land
clinging like a shelf to the mountain side, and in an hour's time
brought him to the top.

Now the day was full upon him. Behind and below lay the lake he had
just quitted. He could make out a plume of smoke where the impatience
of Max and George would be bestirring Itself. Ahead and below lay Red
Deer Lake, a thousand dizzy feet down, seeming impossible of
achievement from where Drennen stood. He pushed a stone over the rocks
with his boot. He saw it leap outward and drop, plummet wise, saw the
white spray of the lake leap upward as the stone plunged into the water.

Drennen had turned the horse loose. From the hog's-back upon which he
stood he could look down into a little valley lying to the eastward and
could make out in it two more pack animals, tethered. He headed this
one down the trail and then turned his eyes back toward Red Deer Lake
and, across it, to the cliffs beyond. For there he had seen a second
plume of smoke.

It seemed to him then that a man must have wings to reach that other
line of cliffs, on the far side of the lake, from which the smoke was
climbing upward. Everywhere the sheer precipices marched up to the rim
of the blue laughter of the water below him, so that one might believe
that neither man nor four-footed denizen of the forestland could come
here to drink; that only the birds, dropping with folded wings, could
visit its shore. But others had been here before him; and surely it
was their smoke which curled upward from the far cliffs. If they had
found a way to go on on foot, leaving their horses here, then he could
find it. And he must find it quickly . . . before Max and George.

First he noted the location of the smoke toward which he sought to go,
so that he would not miss it. Nature aided him, making the spot
distinctive. Everywhere the cliffs were barren, just rock and more
rock, a jumble of great boulders strewn along sheer precipices,
everywhere save alone in this one spot. But there was a scant table
land, and from it a small grove of pines rose high in the blue of the
brightening sky, their gnarled limbs still and sturdy. It was a