To Ned, merely to swing along day after day in the sunshine and note these things, was gladness enough, and it was little notice he took of heat, or thirst, or weariness. Unfortunately he became too absorbed, and as often happens with men unused to leading out, forgot his train and walked right away from his ponies.
When this fact dawned upon him it was nearly mid-day, and he found himself at the highest point which the path had yet reached, from which, looking back, he could see the train crawling wearily after him. He could see, too, that Cruickshank was signalling him to stop, so nothing loth Ned sat down and waited. The path where he sat came out to a sharp promontory, and turning round this it began to pass over the worst stone-slide Ned had yet seen. Most of those he had hitherto encountered had been mere narrow strips of bad going from fifty to a hundred yards across, but this was nearly five hundred yards from side to side, and except where the trail ran, there was not foothold upon it for a fly. Properly speaking it was not, as the natives called it, a stone-slide at all, but rather the bed or shoot, by which, century after century, some hundreds of stone-slides had gone crashing down into the lake below.
As soon as Ned had assured himself that the train was once more as near to him as it ought to be, he knocked off as much of the projecting corner as he could, and passed round it on to the slide.
Looking up from the narrow trail, the young Englishman could see the great rocks which hung out from the cliffs above; rocks whose fellows had been the makers of this slide, letting go their hold up above as the snows melted and the rains sapped their foundations, and then thundering down to the lake with such an army of small stones and debris that it seemed as if the whole mountain-side was moving. When this stone-avalanche crashed into the water a wave rolled out upon the lake big as an ocean swell from shore to shore.
Looking down, a smooth shoot sloped at an angle from him to the blue water.
"Well, that is pretty sheer," muttered Ned, craning his neck to look down to where the lake glistened a thousand feet below, "and if one of our ponies gets his feet off this trail, there won't be anything of him left unbroken except his shoes;" and so saying, he turned to see how the leader would turn the awkward corner which led on to this via diabolica.
As he did so the report of a pistol rang out sharp and clear, followed by a rush and the clatter of falling stones, and the next moment Ned saw the leading pony dash round the overhanging rocks, its ropes all loose, its packs swinging almost under its belly, its bell ringing as if it were possessed, and its eyes starting from its head in the insanity of terror.
At every stride it was touch-and-go whether the brute would keep its legs or not. Each slip and each recovery at that flying pace was in itself a miracle, and Ned hardly hoped that he could stop the maddened beast before it and the packs went crashing down to the lake.
Stop the pony! He might as well have tried to stop a stone-slide. And as he realized this, the danger of his own position flashed across him for the first time.
Coming towards him, now not fifty yards away, was the maddened horse, which probably could not have stopped if it wanted to in that distance, and on such a course. Behind Ned was four hundred yards of such a trail as he hardly dared to run over to escape death, and even if he had dared, what chance in the race would he have had against the horse? Above him there was nothing to which even his strong fingers could cling, and below the trail—well, he had already calculated on the chances of any living thing finding foothold below the trail. Instinctively Ned shouted and threw up his hands. He might as well have tried to blow the horse back with his breath. In another ten seconds the brute would be upon him; in other words, in another ten seconds horse and packs and Ned Corbett would be the centre of a little dust-storm bounding frantically down that steep path to death!