teep, the way grew a trifle easier. It was Grenfell's last
effort, and Weston had no courage left to cheer him on. At times he
stumbled beside him, and then went on and sat down gasping to wait
until his comrade came up with him again. It was a week since they had
made more than half a meal, and much longer since they had eaten a
sufficient one. They were famishing, worn-out, and a trifle fanciful,
while the light was dying fast and a great wall of mountains, beyond
which the cache lay, still rose in front of them.

Dusk crept up from the valley and overtook them as they climbed, then
passed ahead and blotted out the battalions of somber pines. The
little breeze that had sighed among the latter died away, and the
hoarse clamor of the creek intensified the deep silence that wrapped
dusky hillside and lonely valley. Then a half-moon sailed out above
the dim white peaks, and its pale radiance gleamed on frothing water
and dripping stone, and showed the two men still climbing. They drew
their breath heavily; the sweat of effort dripped from them; but they
toiled upward, with tense faces and aching limbs. The cache could not
be very far away, and they realized that if once they lay down they
might never commence the march again.

By and by the creek seemed to vanish, and its roar died away, while
after that they wandered, still ascending, apparently for hours among
dim spires of trees, until the path once more dipped sharply beneath
their feet. They had traversed a wider, shallower valley between the
spur and the parent range. Weston was afterward quite sure of that,
for it had a great shadowy wall of rock on one hand of it.

"We are coming down upon the cache. We have crossed the neck," he
said.

They blundered downward, walking now with half-closed eyes, and
sometimes for a few moments with them shut altogether. At times they
fell over boulders and into thickets of rotting branches that lay
around fallen trees, but, though their senses had almost deserted
them, they were certainly going down. The pines grew taller and
thicker; withered twigs and needles crackled beneath their feet;
though in places they plunged downward amidst a rush of slipping
gravel. Still, half-dazed as he was, Weston was puzzled. It seemed to
him that the gully they were descending was longer than it should have
been. It ought to have led them, by that time, out on a plateau from
which the hillside fell to the hollow where they had made the cache.