CHAPTER XXI. PETE'S CREEK.
For an hour Steve and Ned toiled steadily up the yellow banks, bluff rising above bluff and bench above bench, and all steep and all crumbling to the tread. The banks of the Frazer may possess the charm of picturesqueness of a certain kind for the tourist to whom time is no object, and for whom others work and carry the packs, but they were hateful as the treadmill and a very path of thorns to the men who toiled up them carrying a month's provisions on their backs, and wearing worn-out moccasins upon their swollen, bleeding feet. It was with a sigh of heartfelt thankfulness that Corbett and Chance topped the last bench, and looked away to the west over the undulating forest plateau of Chilcotin. Men know Chilcotin now, or partly know it, as the finest ranching country west of Calgary, but in the days of which I am writing it was very little known, and Steve and his friends looked upon the long reaches and prairies of yellow sun-dried grass, dotted here and there with patches of pine forest, as sailors might look upon the coast of some untrodden island. To Steve and Phon this yellow table-land was the region of fairy gold. It was somewhere here that the yellow stuff which all men love lay waiting for man to find it. Surely it was something more than the common everyday sun which made those Chilcotin uplands so wondrously golden! So thought Steve and Phon.
To Ned all was different. As far as the eye could see a thousand trails led across the bluffs, gradually fading away in the distance. They were but cattle trails—the trails of the wild cattle of those hills—blacktail deer and bighorn sheep, but to Ned they were paths along which the feet of murder had gone, and his eye rested on the dark islands of pine, as if he suspected that the man he sought lurked in their shadow.
"Well, Ned, which is the way? Let's look at the map," said Chance.
Ned produced the map, and together the two men bent over it.
"The trail should run south-west from the top of this ridge, until we strike what old Pete calls here a 'good-sized chunk of a crik.' That is our first landmark. 'Bear south-west from the big red bluff,' he says—and there's the bluff," and Ned pointed to a big red buttress of mud upon the further bank of the Frazer.
"That's so, Ned, but I can see another big red bluff, and there are any number of trails leading more or less south-west," replied Chance.
"Well, let's take the biggest," suggested Corbett, and no one having any better plan to propose, his advice was taken.