. It was better to follow an unknown trail than to starve,
and it was not long before it leaked out that Two Arrows was believed to
have gone ahead of them on that very road.

Precisely how far he had gone nobody had any idea. They would hardly
have believed if he had sent back word, for he had travelled most
diligently. There were no longer any traces of starvation about him,
except that he carried no superfluous weight of flesh. He had load
enough, what with his provisions and his weapons, but he did not seem to
mind it. He tramped right along, with a steady, springy step, which told
a good deal of his desire to get as far away from camp as he could
before his absence should be discovered.

For a little distance he had found the trail rising gently with the
land. Then it turned to the left and went up and over a rocky hill, and
then it turned to the right again, and just about sunset it looked for
all the world as if it were running right into the side of a great
precipice of the mountain range. The light of the sinking sun fell
clearly and brightly upon the grand masses of quartz and granite rocks,
and showed him the very point where the pathway seemed to end. It looked
so, but Two Arrows knew that you cannot cut off the end of a buffalo
path in that way, and he pushed on, every moment finding the way steeper
and more winding. He could not make any "short cuts" over such ground
as that, and every Indian boy knows a fact which the white engineers of
the Pacific Railway found out for themselves--that is, that a herd of
buffaloes will always find the best passes through mountain ranges, and
then they will go over them by the best and easiest grades. Only by
bridging a chasm, or blasting rocks, or by much digging, did the railway
men ever improve upon the paths pointed out by the bisons.

Two Arrows had carefully marked his point, and just as the last rays of
daylight were leaving him he sat down to rest in the mouth of what was
little better than a wide "notch" in the side of the vast barrier.

"Ugh! pass," he said.

CHAPTER VI

A THIRSTY MARCH

That was a hard day's toil for the mining expedition. It was the second
day of feasting by the Nez Perces upon the game won by Two Arrows, but
there was no feasting done by Judge Parks and his men. Even Sile had no
more questions to ask, and at nightfall their scanty supply of water was
nearly gone. Every old watercourse and even "tow-heads" of dying bushes
that