m
here,--and fires breaking every day,--and he needs a doctor."

It was not till the deed was done that Ace returned to announce, with the
smile of the cat who has licked the cream, that Rosa had insisted on
taking her brother's place. He, Ace, had found the spot from her sure
knowledge of the topography of the place. (She had kept house there for
her brother the summer before, in the wee, wind-swept cabin.) And leaving
Rosa there, as she pluckily insisted, Ace brought her brother back,
covering in minutes, as the bird flies, what it would have taken a week
to traverse on horseback. Those mountain trails corkscrew up and down the
canyon sides till instead of calling a certain distance a hundred miles
according to the map, one states it, "a week into the back-country,"--or
in the case of the trailless peaks, (among which Long Lester felt most at
home), the same distance might be a matter of a four-weeks' camping trip,
with no human habitation, and the likelihood of not even a ranch at which
to purchase supplies, in between.

Then the Senator sent the 'plane back to San Francisco, and its hangar in
Burlingame, before--as he said--his young hopeful could start anything
more. He himself was to spend the next month fishing around Kings' River
Canyon, putting up at the canvas hotel. But he took as much interest in
the camping trip as if he had been a member of it,--as, indeed, did
Ranger Radcliffe, though word of a fresh forest fire breaking cut short
his part in the powwow.

The question now arose, should they go horseback, or afoot with
pack-burros,--a string of which Long Lester yearned to pilot.

True, a mountain-bred pony will hop and slide up and down mountain ledges
that would make an Eastern horse's hair literally stand on end. They have
been born and bred to it, physically and mentally. They have been known
to sit back almost on their haunches and slide when they could get down
no other way. Some of them will walk a log twenty feet above the surface
of a stream. (The Eastern rider will find that hard to believe, until he
recalls the feats of circus horses.) But not all horses are alike, any
more than people. Why should the plains horse and the park horse and good
old Dobbin, the farm horse, be equine mountaineers and prospectors?

"Shank's horses" and the pack-burros won the final ballot,--to Pedro's
open dismay. But they would first ride the well-defined two-days'
horseback trail from Giant Forest to the Kings'