our horses
now showed signs of poisoning, two of them walked with a sprawling
action of the fore legs, their eyes big and glassy. One was too weak
to carry anything more than his pack-saddle, and our going had a sort
of sullen desperation in it. Our camps were on the muddy ground,
without comfort or convenience.

Next morning, as I swung into the saddle and started at the head of
my train, Ladrone threw out his nose with a sharp indrawn squeal of
pain. At first I paid little attention to it, but it came again--and
then I noticed a weakness in his limbs. I dismounted and examined him
carefully. He, too, was poisoned and attacked by spasms. It was a
sorrowful thing to see my proud gray reduced to this condition. His
eyes were dilated and glassy and his joints were weak. We could not
stop, we could not wait, we must push on to feed and open ground; and
so leading him carefully I resumed our slow march.

But at last, just when it seemed as though we could not go any
farther with our suffering animals, we came out of the poisonous
forest upon a broad grassy bottom where a stream was flowing to the
northwest. We raised a shout of joy, for it seemed this must be a
branch of the Nasse. If so, we were surely out of the clutches of the
Skeena. This bottom was the first dry and level ground we had seen
since leaving the west fork, and the sun shone. "Old man, the worst
of our trail is over," I shouted to my partner. "The land looks more
open to the north. We're coming to that plateau they told us of."

Oh, how sweet, fine, and sunny the short dry grass seemed to us after
our long toilsome stay in the sub-aqueous gloom of the Skeena
forests! We seemed about to return to the birds and the flowers.

Ladrone was very ill, but I fed him some salt mixed with lard, and
after a doze in the sun he began to nibble grass with the others, and
at last stretched out on the warm dry sward to let the glorious sun
soak into his blood. It was a joyous thing to us to see the faithful
ones revelling in the healing sunlight, their stomachs filled at last
with sweet rich forage. We were dirty, ragged, and lame, and our
hands were calloused and seamed with dirt, but we were strong and
hearty.

We were high in the mountains here. Those little marshy lakes and
slow streams showed that we were on a divide, and to our minds could
be no other than the head-waters of the Nasse, which has a watershed
of its own to the sea. We believed the worst of our t