“Are you all ready?” he asked.
“Yes,” replied Brush from the rear.
“Hold the bridle so gentle that you can let go if your animal slips off: if he has to go over the precipice, there’s no need of your follering him.”
Each man took his Winchester in hand, and loosely grasping the bridle rein, began stealing forward, the captain’s loss compelling him to make his single arm answer for both purposes. The advance was necessarily slow, for it was made with the utmost care. The path could not have been more dangerous than for the brief stretch between them and the broad, safe support beyond.
Several times the trail so narrowed that each trembled through fear of not being able to keep his balance, 201 while it seemed absolutely impossible for a horse to do so; but one of the strange facts connected with that intelligent animal is that, despite his greater bulk, he is generally able to follow wherever his master leads. So it was that when a miner carefully turned his head, he saw his steed following slowly but unfalteringly in his footsteps.
It was soon perceived that this perilous stretch did not take a straight course, but assumed the form of an immense, partial circle. When half way around, the plodders came in sight of a huge rent in the distant mountain wall, through which the sky showed nearly from the zenith to the horizon. In this immense V-shaped space shone the moon nearly at its full, and without a rift or fleck of cloud in front of its face.
A flood of light streamed through and between the encompassing peaks, tinging the men and animals with its fleecy veil, as if some of the snow from the crests had been sprinkled over them. On their left, the craggy wall sloped almost vertically downward, the projecting masses of rock displaying the same, fairy-like covering, ending in a vast, yawning pit of night and blackness, into whose awful depth the human eye could not penetrate.
On the right, the mass of stone, rock and boulder, rugged, broken and tumbled together, as if flung about by giants in sport, towered beyond the vision’s reach, 202 the caverns, abysses and hollows made the blacker and more impenetrable by the moonlight glinting against the protruding masses.
It was as if a party of Titans had run their chisels along the flinty face of the mountain from the rear, gouging out the stone, with less and less persistency, until they reached the spot where the men and animals were creeping forward, when the dulled tools scarcely made an impression sufficient to support the hesitating feet.
Captain Dawson was but a few paces to the rear of Vose Adams’s mule, whose surety of step he admired and tried to imitate.