"I'll start right away," I assured Armstrong. "It's clearing here."
Johnny Eagle scouted around the lake till he found a stream flowing from the direction of the Twin Peaks. With it as a guide we set off, panting as we stumbled, slipped, crawled along and wincing as needle-pointed evergreens stung our faces.
Sometimes the stream twisted out of sight, but Johnny pushed on with the ancient woodland canniness of the great Frog tribe. There were times, though, when this mystic sense deserted him and we stood perplexed and barely visible to each other a foot away. We waited, then, for some sudden glimmer to reveal our guiding stream.
My weary legs soon told me my estimate of four miles to the Twins was way off. About midnight we broke out of the forest wilderness high up on the timber line. The night was brilliantly clear by this time; sharply etched shadows of dark pines lay about us. Towering into the starry skies were our Peaks, their upper reaches capped with snow, with here and there a thick dark scar where a fissure lay in shadow. For the first time I saw the Twins were joined, Siamese-wise, by a low truncated mass.
Even though the going became easier, I felt more tired than before. The rarefied air sharpened the sense of fatigue and a tightness clutched at my chest. But I forgot all about it when I saw the grave. I spotted it even before Johnny Eagle cried out. The grave lay exposed in a bare patch above a clump of stunted timber; a tilted rotting cross was its only marking.
The almost unhoped-for discovery of this meager clue to the location of Chetzisky infused me with new energy. My tiring legs revived. Johnny Eagle was hard put to stay ahead of me.
On the bare rock shoulder of the granite bastion between the Twin Peaks we came upon a trail. My pace redoubled. Johnny Eagle stared at me in frank admiration and yielded me the lead.
The trail headed straight for the blank, inaccessible face of the ridge. But as we drew near the sheer wall high up near its rim, a cleft appeared, through which the trail led. The defile was narrow, shrinking at times to the width of a man.
Suddenly the walls fell away and we found ourselves on the narrow strand of a crater lake. In its center the dark mass of an island stood out under the starlight.