e climbing, they would climb. If they felt like
lazing, (as Pedro put it), they would laze. If they came to a river they
could cross, all right. If they could not cross, why, all right, who
cared?

There was rumor of vast caves that riddled the back country. There were
hot springs, soda springs,--who knew what? Good pasturage was never hard
to find. The verdant meadows left by the glacier lakes could be counted
on up to the very backs of the 9,000-foot ridges. Most of them were half
to a mile wide, and at the head waters of the big rivers, they had heard,
were meadows nearer ten miles in length.

With one exception, every lake in the Sierras is a glacier lake (that
exception being Huntington, a "made" lake four miles long that falls
three thousand feet through a flume to add power to an electric plant).
These lakes lie all the way up to as high as 8,000 feet above sea-level,
Norris's theory being that in time they will be found higher still. The
glaciers left by the last ice age naturally melted first in the lower
reaches, and as those that now cap the peaks and flow down between ridges
like the arms of a starfish, melt in their turn, they will leave their
icy, green-blue crystal pools higher and higher up the mountainsides.
Just North of Mt. Ritter, Norris told them, lies a glacier lake at an
altitude of 12,000 feet, while the glaciers still to be found are slowly,
slowly grinding out the basins of the lakes that will one day, (possibly
centuries hence), lie where now linger these evidences of the last
glacier epoch.

Where these lakes have in their turn disappeared they have left these
rich-soiled meadows. Where these level-lying meadows failed them
pasturage for their burros, Norris guaranteed that there would be plenty
of hanging meadows,--long, narrow, bowldery strips of weed enameled
verdure slanting up and down the moraine-covered canyon sides, beginning
away up at timber line, where springs the source of their life-giving
moisture.

Before the group broke up that day, word came that Rosa's brother had
broken his leg, there at the fire outlook on Red Top. (A pack-mule had
crowded his horse off the trail on the steep slope of an arroyo, and the
horse had fallen, though breaking his otherwise sure descent into the
creek below by coming sharply up against a tree trunk.)

"The worst of it is," worried Radcliffe, "with men so scarce, I don't
know who to send in his place. Besides, it's a week's horseback trip fro