“I don’t know.”
“That’s a tall story,” Freegift murmured, to Terry; and tapped his head. Evidently they didn’t believe it “Where do you think you are now, then?” he asked, of Stub.
“I guess I’m with Lieutenant Pike. But where is he?”
“Well, we’ll tell you. You see, that yaller hoss an’ you went down together. You got a crack on the head, an’ the hoss, he died. We had to shoot him. But we picked you up, because you seemed like worth savin’. The lieutenant put a bandage on you. Then he took the rest of the outfit up out the canyon. The hosses couldn’t go on—there wasn’t any footin’. But he left Terry an’ me to pack the dead hoss’s load an’ some other stuff that he couldn’t carry, on a couple of sledges, an’ to fetch them an’ you on by river an’ meet him below. Understand?”
Stub nodded. How his brain did whirl, trying to patch things together! It was as if he had wakened from a dream, and couldn’t yet separate the real from the maybe not.
“We’d best be going on,” Terry Miller warned. “We’re to ketch the cap’n before night, and we’re short of grub.”
So the sledges proceeded by the river trail, while Stub lay and pondered. By the pain now and then in his head, when the sledge jolted, he had struck his scar; but somehow he had a wonderful feeling of relief, there. He was a new boy.
The trail continued as rough as ever. Most of the way the two men, John and Terry, had to pull for all they were worth; either tugging to get their sledges around open water by route of the narrow strips of shore, or else slipping and scurrying upon the snowy ice itself. Steep slopes and high cliffs shut the trail in, as before. The gaps on right and left were icy ravines and canyons that looked to be impassible.
The main party were not sighted, nor any trace of them. Toward dusk, which gathered early, Terry, ahead, halted.
“It beats the Dutch where the cap’n went to,” he complained. “He got out, and he hasn’t managed to get back in, I reckon. Now, what to do?”