We started at 11 a.m. For three miles we followed a winding creek, the horsemen on a slow trot, crossing the stream a dozen times; the footmen keeping up as best they could, and shivering from their frequent baths in the icy waters.
A Terrible Mountain March.
We turned up the sharp side of a snowy mountain. For hours and hours we toiled along, up one rocky, pine-covered hill, down a little declivity, then up another hill, then down again, but constantly gaining in hight. The snow was ten inches deep. Dan averred he had never crossed the mountain when the travel was so hard; but he pushed on, as if death were behind and heaven before.
The rarity of the air at that elevation increased my pneumonic difficulty, and rendered my breath very short. Ellis furnished me with a horse the greater part of the way; but the hills, too steep for riding, compelled us to climb, our poor animals following behind. The pithy proverb, that "it is easy to walk when one leads a horse by the bridle," was hardly true in my case, for it seemed a hundred times to-day as if I could not possibly take another step, but must fall out by the roadside, and let the company go on. But after my impressive lesson of last night, I was hardly likely to halt so long as any locomotive power remained.
Our men and animals, in single file, extended for more than a mile in a weary, tortuous procession, which dragged its slow length along. After hours which appeared interminable, and efforts which seemed impossible, we halted upon a high ridge, brushed the snow from the rocks, and sat down to a cold lunch, beside a clear, bright spring which gushed vigorously from the ground. I ventured to ask:
"Are we near the top?"
"About half way up," was Dan's discouraging reply.
"Come, come, boys; we must pull out!" urged Davis; and, following that irrepressible invalid, we moved forward again.
As we climbed hill after hill, thinking we had nearly reached the summit, beyond us would still rise another mountain a little higher than the one we stood upon. They seemed to stretch out to the crack of doom.
A Storm Increases the Discomforts.