'So long!' cried the Judge. 'Keep your eyes skinned at night, pard!'
And with the bell of the leading pack-animal tinkling merrily the two boys, and all the ponies save the Cradle and another, disappeared among the trees on the back track.
Dick and the boys stood looking along the trail for some time after their friends were out of sight. Now and again they could hear the bell or a cry from Texan or the Judge to one of the self-willed ponies, but by degrees they passed out of earshot as out of sight.
'I guess we'd better tramp,' said Dick, turning to the three young Englishmen, over whom a certain sense of loneliness had been stealing.
For the first time they realised what this adventure meant. They saw now that for the next four months at any rate they were entirely dependent upon their own efforts for all the necessaries of life. They were only four men, armed and strong, it is true, isolated among the great things of Nature—mountains and forests, and by-and-by ice and snow and tempest—and cut off from railways and the civilised world, and bound to die if they could not find food and make shelter for themselves. Old Dick, used all his life to depend on his own right hand for everything he wanted, probably only felt a bit of a wrench at parting from his old comrades and saying good-bye to his old position of foreman.
The boys felt a good deal more than that. Those two rough-riders, driving their string of pack ponies before them, were to them the world, or at any rate their last glimpse of it.
'You had better lead "the Cradle," Snap,' cried Wharton, 'but I reckon we'll all have to swim at the ford. Your friends can swim, I suppose?'
'Like fish, Dick,' replied Frank for himself and brother.
'Come on, then,' said the old man, and with a long, swinging stride the four started on their hundred-mile walk.
All four were in mocassins, flannel shirts, and pants of blue jean. On their heads they wore the usual cowboy hat, a wide light-coloured sombrero. Snap carried his rifle, as the best shot of the party, but the others had tied their rifles with their coats and blankets on the pack-animals' backs.