unpacking at evening would find some missing from the
ranks.

"Lily's a goner, sure," said Wes. "I don't know how she's got this far
except by drunken man's luck. She'll never make the Tunemah."

"And Tunemah himself," pointed out the Tenderfoot, naming his own fool
horse; "I see where I start in to walk."

"Sort of a 'morituri te salutamur,'" said I.

We climbed the two thousand two hundred feet, leading our saddle-horses
to save their strength. Every twenty feet we rested, breathing heavily
of the rarified air. Then at the top of the world we paused on the
brink of nothing to tighten cinches, while the cold wind swept by us,
the snow glittered in a sunlight become silvery like that of early
April, and the giant peaks of the High Sierras lifted into a distance
inconceivably remote, as though the horizon had been set back for their
accommodation.

To our left lay a windrow of snow such as you will see drifted into a
sharp crest across a corner of your yard; only this windrow was twenty
feet high and packed solid by the sun, the wind, and the weight of its
age. We climbed it and looked over directly into the eye of a round
Alpine lake seven or eight hundred feet below. It was of an intense
cobalt blue, a color to be seen only in these glacial bodies of water,
deep and rich as the mantle of a merchant of Tyre. White ice floated
in it. The savage fierce granite needles and knife-edges of the
mountain crest hemmed it about.

But this was temporizing, and we knew it. The first drop of the trail
was so steep that we could flip a pebble to the first level of it, and
so rough in its water-and-snow-gouged knuckles of rocks that it seemed
that at the first step a horse must necessarily fall end over end. We
made it successfully, however, and breathed deep. Even Lily, by a
miracle of lucky scrambling, did not even stumble.

"Now she's easy for a little ways," said Wes, "then we'll get busy."

When we "got busy" we took our guns in our hands to preserve them from
a fall, and started in. Two more miracles saved Dinkey at two more
places. We spent an hour at one spot, and finally built a new trail
around it. Six times a minute we held our breaths and stood on tiptoe
with anxiety, powerless to help, while the horse did his best. At the
especially bad places we checked them off one after another,
congratulating ourselves on so much saved as each came across without
accident. When there were no bad places, the trail