CHAPTER VII
INTO THE BLACKNESS
Bill and Abington came to and entered a narrow, straight-walled gorge. It had a loose, sandy bottom and every indication that ages before it had been a watercourse with the floods of glacial rainfall sluicing down to the valley. Presently Bill, plowing laboriously ahead to a certain spring he remembered in a cave up this ravine, gave a grunt and stopped short.
In the peculiar, amethystine veil of the afterglow which lay upon the hills like a cunning stage effect of, colored lights, he pointed a finger stiffly to a certain mark in the sand. Abington limped forward and joined him.
“I see the gosh-awful is here ahead of us,” he said listlessly. “Well, it will be obliged to wreck us personally this time, Bill, since all our worldly goods are literally on our backs. We may get a sight of it at last.”
“That all you care?” Bill stared at him. “Maybe I’d feel that way about it, too, if I had a gun to defend myself with. You’re making a big mistake, professor. You’ll see it before you’re through.”
“Possibly.” Abington’s tone was skeptical. “How far is it to the spring?”
Bill did not reply. He was still staring at the strange tracks that were too large for any sheep one could imagine, yet not shaped like cattle tracks, nor much resembling the elk they had discussed last night. Blurred though they were in the fine sand, they were yet easily distinguishable to being the same hoof prints they had seen across the valley.
The tracks did not look very fresh, and after a brief study of them Abington took the lead, perhaps because he was armed and Bill was not.
Presently Abington stopped and pointed to a cleft in the rocks. “Whatever it is, it turned out of the gorge and went up there,” he said. “Pretty good climbing, even for a sheep.”
“I’ll go ahead and show you the spring,” Bill volunteered and Abington chuckled to himself.