were it heaped up before them, they could carry it
away. And most of all was my heart troubled by the fate that was like to
overtake Pablo because of his love for me. Bitterly I blamed myself for
permitting the boy to come with me; for I should have foreseen that a
hundred chances might intervene to render impossible my intention to
give him his free choice to go or to stay when the decisive
turning-point in our adventure came. In point of fact, one of these
chances had intervened; and the attack upon us that the Indians had
made, and the closing of the passage in the rock behind us that rendered
return impossible, had forced him to remain with us without voice of his
own in the matter; and now would bring him, as it would bring the rest
of us, to the most horrible death of which a man can die.

Night was falling as we ended our search along the cliffs for a way of
escape, and found none, and so came again in front of the great
idol--where our packs had been left heaped up, and where the Wise One,
happily unmindful of the fate that might soon be in store for him, was
energetically cropping the rich grass. We built a fire, for the air in
that deep valley, mingling with the mists rising from the lake, was damp
and chill; and beside the fire we made our evening meal. There was no
good in talking about what was so apparent to all of us; but Young, who
was our cook, showed his appreciation of the situation practically by
serving only half rations and by making our coffee very thin and poor.

Silently we ate our short allowance of food; and thereafter we smoked
our pipes with but little talk for seasoning, and that little of a
melancholy sort. Of our own plight we did not speak at all, but in what
we said there was constantly a reflection of the bitter sorrow with
which all our hearts were charged. I remember that Young, who truly was
as merry a man naturally as ever I knew, told us that night only of
dreadful railroad accidents--of wrecks in which men lay crushed among
the heaped-up cars, shrieking with the agony of their hurts; and then
shrieking with dread, and with yet greater pain as the fire that seized
upon the ruin around them came nearer and nearer until they fairly were
roasted alive. And Rayburn told of a prospecting party besieged by
Indians upon a mountain peak in Colorado; how, one by one, they slowly
died in a raving horror of thirst until one man alone was left; and how
this one man prolonged his life until r