"I can't travel no more," he gasped. "Too old. You go ahead."
"Go back and help the boys," Angus said. "There's a moon to-night and I may not be back. If I don't find him I'll come in in the morning."
"Be darn sure you do come in. Don't take no chances."
Angus ran on up the draw. Now that he was alone he began to put forth his strength and speed while the light should last. He was sure that Gavin would make for the higher ground. He would cross the summit of that range, and go ahead for the Cache. Though he had neither food nor outfit he had his six-shooter and presumably ammunition and matches. Angus knew that he himself would suffer little more than inconvenience if he were in Gavin's place.
The draw narrowed, and steep hills closed in on either hand. He turned to the right and began to climb. Darkness overtook him and he stopped. The cold chilled his sweating body with the cessation of motion, but Gavin was as badly off. When the moon rose he went on again, but it was slow work. Objects were distorted. Shadows lay where he would have had light. Once he slipped and fell, slithering twenty feet and barely saving himself from an almost perpendicular drop of a hundred. He crawled back with difficulty, but his rifle was gone. He had heard it clang far below him. However, he had his belt gun, and so was on a par with Gavin.
His objective was what seemed to be a notch in the summit. It was what he would make for were he in Gavin's place. He toiled upward methodically, without hurry now, for there might be a long trail ahead. If Gavin could go to the Cache so could he. The timber began to thin out, to stunt. Trees were dwarfed, twisted by the mountain winds, mere miniatures. Presently they ceased altogether. He was above timberline.
There the thin snow partially covered the ground, increasing the difficulty of travel. But its actinic qualities gave more light. It was past midnight, and the moon was well up. He had been traveling for more than seven hours.
For a moment he paused to rest, his lungs feeding greedily on the thin, cold air, and surveyed the scene below. It was a black fur of tree-tops, rolling, undulating, cleft with lines of greater darkness indicating greater depths. He could look over the tops of lesser mountains. Above were the peaks of the range, whitened spires against the sky.
In those far heights of the mountain wilderness one seemed to touch the rim of space itself. The moon, the night, the height produced an effect of unspeakable vastness. It seemed to press in, to enfold the tiny atom crawling upon and clinging to the surface of the earth. There finite and infinite made contact. It was like the world's end, the Ultima Thule of ancient man.
Some such thoughts, vague, scarcely formed, passed through his mind. The ranch, ploughed land, houses, seemed to belong to another world.