Bassett removed the evidences of their meal, or extinguished the
dying fire and scattered the ashes. Nor, when they were mounted, the
care with which they avoided the trail. He gave, when asked, information
as to the direction of the railroad at the foot of the western slope of
the range, and at the same instigation found a trail for them some miles
beyond their starting point. But mostly he merely followed, in a dead
silence.

They made slow progress. Both horses were weary and hungry, and the
going was often rough and even dangerous. But for Dick's knowledge of
the country they would have been hopelessly lost. Bassett, however,
although tortured with muscular soreness, felt his spirits rising as the
miles were covered, and there was no sign of the pursuit.

By mid-afternoon they were obliged to rest their horses and let them
graze, and the necessity of food for themselves became insistent. Dick
stretched out and was immediately asleep, but the reporter could not
rest. The magnitude of his undertaking obsessed him. They had covered
perhaps twenty miles since leaving the cabin, and the railroad was still
sixty miles away. With fresh horses they could have made it by dawn of
the next morning, but he did not believe their jaded animals could go
much farther. The country grew worse instead of better. A pass ahead,
which they must cross, was full of snow.

He was anxious, too, as to Dick's physical condition. The twitching was
gone, but he was very pale and he slept like a man exhausted and at his
physical limit. But the necessity of crossing the pass before nightfall
or of waiting until dawn to do it drove Bassett back from an anxious
reconnoitering of the trail at five o'clock, to rouse the sleeping man
and start on again.

Near the pass, however, Dick roused himself and took the lead.

"Let me ahead, Bassett," he said peremptorily. "And give your horse his
head. He'll take care of you if you give him a chance."

Bassett was glad to fall back. He was exhausted and nervous. The trail
frightened him. It clung to the side of a rocky wall, twisting and
turning on itself; it ran under milky waterfalls of glacial water, and
higher up it led over an ice field which was a glassy bridge over a
rushing stream beneath. To add to their wretchedness mosquitoes hung
about them in voracious clouds, and tiny black gnats which got into
their eyes and their nostrils and set the horses frantic.

Once across the ice field Dick's hors