“It’s most likely the ranchman’s wagon road,” he hazarded. “He’d have to have some way of hauling his hay to Little Ophir.”
“Well,” Dick cut in, “this isn’t finding Blaisdell. Shall we climb down and begin the hunt?”
Now the task which had been set them, of finding two human atoms in the maze of forest and mountain which lay at their feet, was not quite so much of a needle-in-a-haystack search as it might appear to be. Since Blaisdell and his helper had gone ahead to reset grade stakes, all the searchers had to do was to find the Short Line survey in the maze and then to follow the staked trail until they came to the resetters.
At first they tried to hold a straight course down the mountain from their lookout summit. But here great Nature intervened. Precipices they could not descend got in the way, and when these had been circumvented, there were steep gulches to be headed and lower spurs to be climbed—with more gulches on their farther sides.
Winding and twisting, climbing and descending, and twice crossing small streams, they came finally into the valley with the curious name—and were so completely turned around that they had to look at their watches and the position of the sun to locate their point of approach, which was far up the southern side of the valley. In other words, they had made more than a quarter-circuit of their goal in getting down to it.
“Gee!” Dick exclaimed—he was beginning to lag a bit from sheer leg-weariness—“the long way around may be the shortest way home, as the old saying goes, but if it is, we didn’t find it. Whereabouts are we, anyhow?”
It was rather hard to tell just where they were, in relation to their surroundings. At the near-hand view the valley didn’t look anything like the yellowish flat they had seen from the heights. For one thing, the yellow turned out to be the dirty fawn-color of disintegrated sandstone; and instead of being flat, as it had looked, the park was thickly “pimpled,” at least in their part of it, with low hills of the weathering stone.
“The first thing to do is to find the line of our survey,” said Larry. “We can’t miss running across some of the stakes if we go straight ahead the way we’re facing now.”
That seemed reasonable. From many former studyings of the maps and blue-prints they knew the general route of the Extension, though this was the first time they had been out this far ahead of the actual working forces. Not having any maps with them, and neither of them being able to recall from memory the exact route of the new line through the valley, there was nothing to do but to hunt for the line of stakes. So they set out northward among the stony hills, keeping a sharp lookout as they went for the line of the survey.