"Ah, there is that about it! Have you got the map?"
"Yes. I've got that all right. Oh, we shall do it in good time;" and Ned looked up at his only clock, the great red sun, which was now nearly overhead.
The next moment Corbett's face fell. The path led round a bluff, beyond which he expected to see the trail go winding gradually down to a little group of tents and huts gathered about Williams Creek. Instead of that he found himself face to face with one of those exasperating gulches which so often bar the weary hunter's road home in the Frazer country. The swelling uplands rolled on, it was true, sinking gradually to the level of Williams Creek, and he could see the trail running from him to his goal in fairly gentle sweeps, all except about half a mile of it, and that half-mile lay right in front of him, and was invisible.
It had sunk, so it seemed to Ned, into the very bowels of the earth, and another hundred yards brought him to the edge of the gulch and showed him that this was the simple truth. As so often happens in this country which ice has formed (smoothing it here and cutting great furrows through it elsewhere), the downs ended without warning in a precipitous cliff leading into a dark narrow ravine, along the bottom of which the gold-seekers could just hear the murmur of a mountain stream.
It was useless to look up and down the ravine. There was no way over and no way round. It was a regular trap. A threadlike trail, but well worn, showed the only way by which the gulch could be crossed, and as Ned looked at it he came to the conclusion that if there was another such gulch between him and Williams Creek it would probably cost him all he was worth, for no one in his party could hope to cross two such gulches before nightfall.
"It's no good looking at it, come along, Steve!" he cried, and grasping at any little bush within reach to steady his steps, Ned began the descent.
Who ever first made that trail was in a hurry to get to Williams Creek. The recklessness of the gold miner, determined to get to his gold, and careless of life and limb in pursuit of it, was apparent in every yard of that descent, which, despising all circuitous methods, plunged headlong into the depths below.
Twice on the way down Steve only owed his life to the stout mountain weeds to which his fingers clung when his feet forsook him, and once it was only Ned's strong hand which prevented Phon from following a great flat stone which his stumbling feet had sent tobogganing into the dark gulf below.
For two or three minutes Ned had to hold on to Phon by the scruff of the neck before he was quite certain that he was to be trusted to walk alone again. Even Steve kept staring into that "dark-profound" into which the stone had vanished in a way which Corbett did not relish. Though he had never felt it himself, he knew all about that strange fascination which seems to tempt some men, brave men too, to throw themselves out of a railway-carriage, off a pier-head, or down a precipice, and therefore Ned was not sorry to be at the bottom of that precipitous trail without the loss of either Steve or Phon.
"Say, Ned, how does that strike you? It's a 'way-up' bridge, isn't it, old man?" and the speaker pointed to a piece of civil engineering characteristic of Cariboo.