d on it.

We followed him thus for a mile or two, along the regular path; then of
a sudden, in an open part, the trail failed us. I turned back, a few
yards, and looked close, with my eyes fixed on the spongy soil, as keen
as a hound that sniffs his way after his quarry. 'He went off _here_,
Elsie!' I said at last, pulling up short by a spindle bush on the
hillside.

'How do you know, Brownie?'

'Why, see, there are the marks of his stick; he had a thick one, you
remember, with a square iron spike. These are its dints; I have been
watching them all the way along from the _chalet_!

'But there are so many such marks!'

'Yes, I know; I can tell his from the older ones made by the spikes of
alpenstocks because Harold's are fresher and sharper on the edge. They
look so much newer. See, here, he slipped on the rock; you can know that
scratch is recent by the clean way it's traced, and the little
glistening crystals still left behind in it. Those other marks have been
wind-swept and washed by the rain. There are no broken particles.'

'How on earth did you find that out, Brownie?'

How on earth did I find it out! I wondered myself. But the emergency
seemed somehow to teach me something of the instinctive lore of hunters
and savages. I did not trouble to answer her. 'At this bush, the tracks
fail,' I went on; 'and, look, he must have clutched at that branch and
crushed the broken leaves as the twigs slipped through his fingers. He
left the path here, then, and struck off on a short cut of his own along
the hillside, lower down. Elsie, we must follow him.'

She shrank from it; but I held her hand. It was a more difficult task
to track him now; for we had no longer the path to guide us. However, I
explored the ground on my hands and knees, and soon found marks of
footsteps on the boggy patches, with scratches on the rock where he had
leapt from point to point, or planted his stick to steady himself. I
tried to help Elsie along among the littered boulders and the dwarf
growth of wind-swept daphne: but, poor child, it was too much for her:
she sat down after a few minutes upon the flat juniper scrub and began
to cry. What was I to do? My anxiety was breathless. I couldn't leave
her there alone, and I couldn't forsake Harold. Yet I felt every minute
might now be critical. We were making among wet whortleberry thicket and
torn rock towards the spot where I had seen the birds wheel and circle,
screaming. The only way left wa