As for their food, that was not hard to carry. Each man had a crust still left in his pocket, and more than enough tobacco. Along the trail there were plenty of streams full of good water, and if bread and water and tobacco did not satisfy them, they would have to remain unsatisfied. It had been a hard race against time, and the last lap still remained to be run; but that smoke was the goal, and with the goal in sight even Phon shuffled along a little faster, though he was so tired that, whenever he stumbled he fell from sheer weakness.
The bald mountains so often alluded to in Cariboo story are ranges of high upland, rising above the forest level, and entirely destitute of timber at the top.
Here in late summer the sunnier slopes are slippery with a luxuriant growth of long lush grasses and weeds, and ablaze with the vivid crimson of the Indian pink. In early spring (and May is early spring in Cariboo) there is still snow along the ridges, and even down below, though the grasses are brilliantly green, the time of flowers has hardly yet come.
Here and there as the three hurried down they came across big boulders of quartz gleaming in the sun. These were as welcome to Steve as the last milestone on his road home to a weary pedestrian. Where the quartz was, there would the gold be also, argued Steve, and the thought roused him for a moment out of the mechanical gait into which he had fallen. But he soon dropped into it again. A hill had risen and shut the column of smoke out of his sight, and the trail was leading down again to the timber.
Away far to the east a huge dome of snow gleamed whitely against the sky-line. That was the outpost of the Rockies. But Steve had no eyes even for the Rockies. All he saw was a sea of endless brown hills rolling and creeping away fold upon fold in the distance, all so like one to another from their bald ridges to the blue lakes at their feet, that his head began to spin, and he almost thought that he must be asleep, and this some nightmare country in which he wandered along a road that had no end.
Luckily Ned roused him from this dreamy fit from time to time, or it might well have happened that Steve's journey would have ended on this side of Williams Creek in a rapid slide from the narrow trail to the bottom of one of the little ravines along which it ran.
Both men were apparently thinking of the same subject. So that though their sentences were short and elliptical, they had no difficulty in understanding each other's meaning. Men don't waste words on such a march as theirs.
"Another three hours ought to do it," Ned would mutter, shifting his pack so as to give the rope a chance of galling him in a fresh place.
"If we get there by midnight, I reckon it would do."
"Yes, if we could find the claims."